She had studied his anatomical sketches for days after she first saw them. Although it had been strange to think of sex with a quadruped alien at that time, the idea had intrigued her more and more during their close confinement.
That he believed she was faking interest stung. She had never faked it in her life, never offered anyone a sympathy fuck.
She only fucked someone because she wanted to—because she felt something more than casual interest in them. It had been a long time since she had been genuinely interested. If she were hard up, she could take care of herself. Her rabbit vibrator and a porn took care of the issue quickly—not that she had her handy little vibrator. Fucking opened her up to too many entanglements.
He was so shy and awkward around her that she had found it sweet and endearing. More so, she had come to care about him, and it felt natural and right to move their connection into the next level of intimacy. There was so much strength behind her desire to draw physically closer to him that it had been almost a compulsion. She was so sure that he had felt it too.
Then he had let his mouth ruin it.
Charlie folded the material in her hand more aggressively than necessary. It didn’t help that her sleep hadn’t been terribly restful, and that he had snuck away before she woke. She knew he had responsibilities, and that the king wanted him at the palace at sunrise, but his attitude reeked of avoidance.
The f’anril chirped from where he had climbed on one of the posts of stone that the huge cushion she took as a form of a couch for an a’sankh stretched across. She still hadn’t named him, and he had already almost doubled in size. Thanks to Ag’hana, they had been able to use her orb and find the information to determine the kit’s sex. That, at least, was a starting point.
She took a chunk of a vegetable that was apparently used in a sort of stew. It was inedible for Tak’sinii raw due to how hard it was, but apparently was a favorite food of f’anrils. She whistled and held it up for him.
“Come here, baby,” she cooed.
She expected the kit to scamper back down the couch, but instead he launched himself at her, his puffball body almost completely flattening as he sailed through the air and landed on her shoulder. She let out a startled laugh.
“Look at you, just a regular MacGyver,” she praised, as she handed him the tiny bit of vegetable.
Homesickness rolled over her as the words left her mouth. MacGyver had been her mother’s favorite show. Stella had loved the remastered MacGyver vids. She said nothing could match a hard lovin’ man from the twentieth century—a dig at Charlie’s absentee father who left to be reassigned to another zone without any attempts to obtain a marriage permit and take a pregnant Stella with him. Her mother never forgave him for that.
Life was hard enough for non-gratas. Worse for the single mothers among those numbers. Watching her mother struggle taught Charlie a lot about making bad decisions when it came to sex and relationships. Still, she and her mother had each other until Charlie reached the age of majority and Earth Gov decided to relocate her to a different employment zone. It had been so far away that she hadn’t seen her mother in years outside of the occasional comm when time zones worked in their favor.
Being sent to Turongal, however, completely severed her from her mother.
Swiping a tear from her eye, she gave the f’anril a watery smile. “What do you think? Does MacGyver suit you? You’ve got a lot of potential man-of-danger mystery lurking about you.”
MacGyver chirped, making her chuckle. Cuddling him against her shoulder, Charlie slid the basket to a corner of the room where it would be out of the way.
As the time passed, she soon found herself frowning at the wall. This wasn’t going to work. She hadn’t lied when she told him she liked his home, but she was accustomed to having something that demanded her attention every day. She simply didn’t know what to do with free time. Climbing on the couch, she lay back and stared at the ceiling.
With nothing to focus her attention on, her eyes rolled across to the wall and down until they landed on an orb on a large metal stand,