The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,68
were never going to be my favorite thing—Mattis and Nox left, both of them staring at me long enough as they did to make my cheeks feel feverish. I forced myself to ignore the sensation. It was strange to go from a time when I couldn’t even imagine the kinds of feelings I was having, to experiencing the lust of all of this regularly. Not only that, but it was perfectly acceptable for me to feel this way.
But we had things to do, and I couldn’t just sit around and have a lot of sex. Could I? I shook my head. No, they’d asked me to teach them to read. And I was going to do that.
Astor and I cuddled up on his couch, and I started a slightly more advanced lesson. Like I would with a child, I started out with the basics, but Astor’s mind was sharper than any I’d ever worked with before. Maybe it was because they did essentially “read” numbers here, but he quickly made sense of early phonics and started to remember the alphabet in record time. We went a good three hours before I could tell he’d had enough.
He rose, disentangling himself from me as he did. Leaning over, he kissed my lips. “Best teacher, ever.”
I shook my head. “Um…I think it’s more about what kind of student you are and less to do with me.”
His smile was fast. “I’m smart. I’m troubled in other ways, but my brain was never one of them.” He walked over to his workbench and picked up what I quickly recognized was my holowatch. He held it up.
“I think I’ve come to understand it.”
I rose. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not troubled. People who mess with you are troubled. Not the other way around. That’s remarkable if you can figure out that watch. I never could.”
“Few more days and maybe… No, I won’t even say what I was going to say in case it doesn’t work. I don’t want to disappoint you.”
I wrapped my arms around him. “Thanks for trying to fix it. You could never disappoint me.”
He wiped the hair off my forehead. “Do you want to go someplace pretty? There aren’t many, but there is one place I would show you.”
I nodded. “I’d love to see wherever you wanted me to.”
“Grab a scarf. I want you to cover your face. Don’t ever take the dust lightly. Even I can be bothered by it, and I grew up here.”
Looking around, I spotted one of his scarves. “Can I take this one? I need to get more stuff made for myself or figure out how to become useful enough to do my own.”
“We’ll get you sorted out. It’s now on my list to do.” He winked at me. “I always take care of getting the things on my list done.”
That was good to know. I was a little bit spacier than that. “Aren’t we supposed to be figuring out the rescue of the other girl?”
Astor put out his hand. “We can plot where I’m taking you as well as we can here. Easy enough.”
As we left his rooms, I was thinking about all the beautiful stalactites and crystals in the caves below, so I just assumed that was where we’d be heading. The pretty place. But then Astor turned and headed up, to the wide cavern at the surface and the buildings that were out in the open. We paused before stepping out into the wind and dust, and fitted scarves over our faces. I must have been doing it wrong, because Astor took mine off, folded it just so, and put it back on, starting with winding it about my head almost like a turban.
“Covering your face like this is tragic,” he said, his voice muffled behind his own scarf, though I could see the laughter in his eyes.
“I’d say, rather, that having my ship blow up in space, crashing on an unknown planet, and catching on fire are bigger tragedies,” I said. “But I’ve found all those things survivable, shockingly enough. Guess I’m more of a comedy girl after all.”
“Resilient, I should say,” he replied. He smoothed the scarf over my covered lips, and I could feel the warmth of his fingertips. It was a completely nonsexual touch, but also one of the most sensual things I’ve ever felt. My lips parted, and I puffed a breath through the dark linen.