Earth Fathers Are Weird (Earth Fathers #1) - Lyn Gala Page 0,26

he had only been able to call his own people, “People.” But when Max had asked what others called them, all the tentacles had curled up like an octopus on a hot griddle.

“I'm concerned about how the offspring plan on arriving,” Max said. He’d been avoiding that question ever since Rick made the big announcement, but Max needed to put on his big boy pants and face the truth.

“Translation matrix failure. Query. Clarify.”

The translator was so much better after months of work, but they would still run into trouble in the weirdest spots. “Query,” Max said. “Will offspring damage me?” Rick had reassured him a number of times, but considering how large the children lumps were getting, Max needed to hear it again.

“No damage. Discomfort. Max good, safe, male surrogate.” Rick was cute in his attempt to say the right words, even when he didn’t understand them. However, Max’s complaints about his masculinity inspired Rick to reaffirm Max’s gender on a semi-regular basis.

Max rubbed his stomach. If this was discomfort, Max did not want to see what Rick would define as pain. If he ever got home to earth, he needed to buy his mother the biggest box of chocolates he could find. Having a living, squirming being inside his guts was not a comfortable feeling. And right now Max felt guilty about every time he’d kicked her bladder.

“Query. Does Max feel damaged?” Tentacles brushed across Max’s stomach.

Max twisted and flailed in the water, and that woke Kohei, who immediately started writhing in his guts. For a half second, Max thought he would go under the water, but then tentacles curled around him, pulling him tight up against Rick’s body. Surprise made Max gasp. Rick was warm, far warmer than Max had expected, given that his tentacles ran on the cool side. “Query. I remove you from the water?”

“No. I’m fine. You startled me.” Max tried to pull away, but Rick held on. Max had an ex-boyfriend or two who had gotten pretty handsy, but nothing prepared him to deal with dozens of tentacles all wrapping around him at once.

“Query. Clarify startled.”

“You moved too quickly or touched me unexpectedly, and my muscles reacted before I made a decision to react.”

“Query. Correlation startle with fight. Correlation startle with flee.”

Max snorted. Of course that’s where Rick’s big brain went first. He was all worried that Max’s instincts would make him hide when the pain of childbirth kicked in. Max had survived a basic training accident where his main parachute hadn’t fully deployed. The backup had worked as designed, but the extra time in freefall and an unanticipated wind had blown him into a wooded area where he’d impaled his leg on a broken tree limb. If he had survived that, he wouldn’t get illogical about a baby octopus crawling out his ass.

“I won’t flee. ‘Startle’ doesn’t correlate with either. And if I were going to run when I hurt, I would already be racing out of the room. I feel like someone has taken a large rock and hit me in the stomach several times.”

Several of Rick's tentacles shriveled up into unhappy little balls. “The water is nutrient rich. I have overfed offspring.”

Max peeled the remaining few tentacles from his arms and pushed away. Part of him didn’t want to because Rick was deliciously warm and squishy. He was like a big bean bag, a hot water bottle, and a body pillow had a kinky threesome. The fact that Max enjoyed his comfort was the biggest reason to avoid it. He couldn’t afford to rely emotionally on Rick. “So that's why you always encouraged me to go swimming. These nutrients aren't anything gross, are they?” Max hoped he wasn't swimming in the alien version of mother's milk.

“Query. Clarify gross.” Rick withdrew his tentacles and allowed Max to swim free, but he kept pace with him and swam close enough to be within tentacle reach.

There were so many ways that Max could’ve answered. However, he chose to go with the definition that concerned him the most. “Clarification. Gross: relating to the bodily fluids of another. Occasionally, relating to one's own bodily fluids if they are fluids that one would rather have on the inside of one's body.”

Max could remember once or twice when he had been particularly gross. As a young man, most of those cases involved alcohol not alien impregnation. Of course the leg impaling incident had also been a little gross. Both blood and urine had been involved, and the medic’s