Earth Fathers Are Weird (Earth Fathers #1) - Lyn Gala Page 0,74

of tiny mouths, each one leaving a dime-sized red mark. Max ran his thumb over one that crossed onto his areola. The skin was sensitive and hot.

Rick walked up behind Max and touched Max’s bare side. “Query. Have I damaged you?”

“No. Human lovers often leave marks like this. We call them hickeys.”

“Observation. We have much different internal structures. You are rare boned-tentacle species. Of contrast, we are sexually compatible.”

“Yes, we are,” Max said with a smile. He grabbed his shirt from the floor. “I enjoyed that a lot.”

Rick gave a little full-body shimmy. Rick followed Max and this time he wrapped several tentacles around Max's left arm. “Query. Why do you fear to be hurt?”

That pretty much killed the afterglow. Max let his right hand fall to his side. He considered running for the hills, only the ship didn’t have hills. Worse, Rick would never understand it if Max fled. He would assume he had done something wrong. Finding out that Max was a warrior had clearly thrown Rick, and there was a certain insecurity there. Max didn’t want to poke any emotional holes. “I think sometimes relationships are more complicated than people can handle,” Max said. “And I think this relationship is complicated because we don't always understand each other.”

“Clarify. Complicated.”

Max huffed. He knew he had programmed that word, but he’d defined the way it applied to a control center having too many buttons or a diagram too many lines. But really, it wasn't that much different with relationships. They had too many differences between them, and wanting this to last forever didn’t change any of the obstacles they would have to overcome. Right now, Rick might be impressed with himself for getting a warrior into his bed, but sooner or later he would want to tangle tentacles with someone who had tentacles. Max spread the fingers of his left hand and the tips of Rick’s tentacles wound between them. “Clarify,” Max said, “complicated is having too many working pieces to watch all of them at once.”

“I have many eyes. I can watch many pieces.”

Max let out a bark of laughter. “You do have many asymmetrical eyes.”

“Thank you.”

The smile faded from Max’s face. “I don't know if even you have enough eyes to watch all the potential problems with the relationship.”

Rick was silent for a long time. He stood with his bulbous head resting against Max's shoulder and little tentacle fingers stroking Max's left arm. “I understand,” he said eventually. “Relationship between species requires ignoring of unpleasant attributes.”

“Query. Like my symmetrical eyes?” Max asked.

“I overlook the flaw because you cannot prevent unfortunate symmetry. I remember much your intestines,” Rick said in a serious tone.

Max had nothing to say to that. He'd had lovers with fetishes in the past, but never had someone cared about intestinal tracts. Sure, as a gay man he’d played with his butt, but he saw his intestines more as a shortcut to the prostate than an attractive feature in and of itself.

“Query. Is there some trait of me that you cannot overlook?” Rick asked. He withdrew some of his tentacles.

“No!” Max tightened his fingers around Rick’s tentacles. “Right now, you seem like the perfect lover. And that's what scares me. Because when we figure out why this isn't going to work, it will hurt to lose you.” A surge of emotion slammed into Max.

“You are warrior.” Rick pulled onto the bed.

“Query. Why say that now?”

Rick wound a few more tentacles around Max’s arm. “Warrior seeks to identify dangers. It is the nature of warrior. You seek trouble and danger in relationship. You can look and look and look and look and look and when you see I will not leave, then you can stop feeling warrior fear.”

“I...” Max stopped. His mother used to tell him that he borrowed trouble from the future, that he was unwilling to even wait for disasters to come before he anticipated them. And he had taken a lot of emotional hits in the last year or so. Too many. A human psychiatrist would probably tell him that he needed time to recover before he made big decisions, like deciding a relationship was doomed because one half of the couple lacked bones in their tentacles.

“Query. You enjoy entangling tentacles.”

If Max didn’t know better, he would say Rick was manipulating him by changing the subject. “You are a sex God. That was the best orgasm of my life, and I enjoyed the sex so much that I have no right to be