my head and press my hands to his stomach, trying to staunch the bleeding.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to my mate. “I’ve got you now.”
9
MARI
It’s a long night.
Every few minutes, I’m convinced that T’chai’s going to die. He grips my hand tightly as we move him into our hut and set him gently down on the bed. Someone brings water, and I begin the arduous task of bathing his wounds. R’jaal helps, and when we’ve washed most of the grit away, he begins to sew up the long, deep gashes as T’chai holds my hand and watches my face with glassy eyes.
All the while, my cootie purrs to his.
I hold his hand tightly, smiling at him. Calm. I don’t want the last thing he sees to be my snotty crying face, so I’m cool and collected. I help R’jaal and take over with the sewing when his hands shake. Once the worst is bandaged with leather and clean leaves, I bathe the blood away from T’chai’s skin and whisper small things to him.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I lie. “You’re going to be just fine.”
It’s not like he can understand me anyhow.
Lauren appears, and I can tell from the tension on her face that T’chai looks like a dying man. Of course he does. R’jaal held his guts earlier and carefully eased them back into place in his abdomen after I washed the sand off of them. Who lives through that? But Lauren mumbles something about how the other tribe—the one of four armed aliens—is going to come and help out because of the injuries here. Her mate went to go get them.
That’s nice, I guess. I find I don’t care about anything other than T’chai.
I don’t leave his side for an instant. I’m afraid that if I do, that’ll be the moment that he breathes his last. I don’t sleep, either. Instead, I keep waiting. Waiting for the moment I become an alien’s widow.
But morning comes and T’chai lives.
I bathe his wounds as he lies unconscious, wishing we had some sort of antibiotic here. Even if we did, has he lost too much blood? His eyes are sunken and he’s pale under his blue coloring. His lips are chapped and the small moments that he wakes up, he won’t eat or drink. He just holds my hands and murmurs words I don’t understand, and they feel stolen from me.
The day passes. The sunlight fades into night, and I hear the others arrive in the camp. I hear M’tok arguing with someone, and S’bren talking, and a baby cry. I hear Lauren’s voice, but I don’t leave T’chai’s side.
He lives through the night. And on through the next day.
And the next.
I don’t know how.
I exist only to stay at his side and support him, to help take care of him. R’jaal helps me force fish broth and dribbles of water down his throat. Lauren helps me wash his wounds and tells me all about a raft that the aliens are building so we can leave the island. I nod and listen, but in reality, it doesn’t matter. I can’t think beyond T’chai drawing the next breath.
Somehow, a week passes and he doesn’t die. I feel hollow and thin, strung out and helpless. My cootie’s stopped humming to his for long stretches of time, and when it does, it no longer feels good. Now, when it hums, it makes me ache all over. It makes me feel like a rubber band that’s been pulled too tight for too long, and I’m waiting to snap in half. I know it’s bothering him, too, because sometimes when his khui begins to resonate, he grimaces, even when unconscious.
If he had enough energy to get hard, I’d ride him until he got me pregnant, just so the resonance could stop torturing us both. But he needs every bit of energy just to survive.
Because…he’s not getting better.
He’s not dying, but there’s still something terribly wrong. His wounds have crusted over and are red around the edges, and his veins are dark as even his blood is polluted. His face grows thinner and more emaciated, and his ribs are so prominent that I count them all at night when I can’t sleep. It hurts me to look at him…and it hurts me to look away. I sleep at his side, my fingers laced with his, listening as his breathing rasps shallowly and he struggles to make his lungs work.
In moments like this, I love him so much and