Of course I was.
I always slept in the nude.
Ava tried to keep her eyes on mine but failed dismally.
She gulped and her eyes drifted down to my length.
Feeling her eyes on me, I automatically stiffened, turning as hard as a rock right before her.
I wasn’t embarrassed.
She was my fated mate.
She was going to have to get used to seeing me naked.
And a whole lot more besides.
I picked up my clothes and slid them on slowly.
She wore different clothes from the night before.
She’d changed into a dress Computer had printed for her.
She had a surprisingly good shape and I couldn’t help but growl in the back of my throat.
Some things were too delicious to pretend you couldn’t see.
She’d removed the rose from her old baggy hoodie and pinned it to her dress.
“Lead the way,” I said.
She turned and I enjoyed watching her shapely ass saunter down the hallway.
Oh, yes, I enjoyed watching her very much.
I snapped out of it.
I could take her right here and now but it meant forfeiting any chance I might have had of scaling the Shadow social ladder and that was something I simply couldn’t bring myself to do.
Not after all the hard work I put into finding and keeping her so far!
Still, I enjoyed watching her head toward the elevator.
We stood there for a moment, a little awkward.
“How are you feeling today?” she said.
“Fine. Why?”
“You seemed a little… spaced out last night. Like you had something on your mind.”
How about realizing we zipped back in time and having no idea when I am or how to return to my own time?
“It’s… nothing.”
I considered revealing the truth, to let her know the situation we now found ourselves in before thinking better of it.
She didn’t need to worry.
If we could get my ship patched up and flying again, I could fly into that storm and we could return to our own time.
She never needed to know the truth about our little adventure.
For her, we were on an alien planet and that was shocking enough for a human.
She didn’t need to know we could very well end up trapped here forever.
We traveled in silence.
“Did you sleep well last night?” I said.
“Yes. Very well. I had a very long day yesterday.”
Not as long as mine, I thought idly.
Try twenty years and see how that feels!
The elevator reached the cargo hold.
We descended the ramp that touched down as we approached it.
I opened the barn door and sunlight hit me full in the face.
A crowfix strutted and lightly bobbed his head while a pair of ghorax chased him and nipped at his tail feathers.
The farm was more beautiful than I remembered.
Maybe I’d repressed the memories to feel less sad at having lost it.
“Ah, you’re up!”
I turned to find a female Qyah tossing handfuls of seed to the clucking crowfixes.
She upended the bucket and the creatures fought over the remains.
“No matter how much I give them, there never seems to be enough,” Pana, Yoath’s wife said.
She clapped off her hands and drew her cardigan closer about herself.
It’d long since been stretched out of shape from the hands of small children.
She’d worn it every day of her life, and it showed with its patchwork pattern of stitched threads.
Little of the original cloth remained but she would sooner stop wearing her skin than that cardigan.
She looked up at me.
Her movements slowed and the smile faded from her face.
A trio of worry lines formed on her forehead that had previously been smooth and without blemish.
Her face turned pale and she stumbled back a step before comporting herself.
She coughed lightly into her hand and smiled, though she no longer made eye contact with me.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well last night and it appears to be catching up with me. Would you like some breakfast?”
“Yes please,” Ava said.
It was only then that my mother turned her attention to Ava and ran her eyes over her.
“Well, aren’t you a beauty? If I were you, I’d get as far away from this horned lump you’ve found yourself with as fast as possible!”
Ava grinned up at me.
“I would have done the same thing,” my mother said, except I don’t think Yoath could survive more than five minutes if I wasn’t here, and the last thing I want is a dead Qyah’s death on my hands. Follow me. I’ll get your bellies filled.”
She marched toward the farmhouse—and march was the right word.
She swung her arms to either side and stomped across the yard with purpose.
The farm animals watched her feet closely, intent on never letting her come anywhere near them.
That was wise.
Mom could be harsh when she wanted to be, not that she didn’t exude the picture of kindness most of the time.
“Yoath!” she barked at the top of her lungs. “Breakfast, you sorry waste of space!”
“Coming!” Yoath yelled from the depths of the farmhouse.
Mom snorted.
“Fool man wouldn’t know when to scratch his ass if I wasn’t here to tell him.”
Ava chuckled as she stepped inside the farmhouse.
It took a moment for me to gather my courage before I could step over the threshold.
The stone step was indented from the thousands of footsteps that had passed it over the years.
The groove fit around my foot.
A memory flashed in the front of my mind.
It showed another foot—much smaller than my own—stepping inside it and wishing…
Yes, I thought, the memory coming back to me clearly.
Wishing my foot was as big as the groove in the step.
Well, now it was, and I wished my foot didn’t have to be there.
The hallways were narrow, the doorframes low, from a time when our ancestors were a whole lot smaller than we were today.
Every Qyah had to duck to fit through them.
Why not extend them?
They weren’t broken so my parents never got around to fixing them.
Ava passed through comfortably enough.
The table was large and set with five places.
“Take a seat and I’ll bring it over,” Pana said.
Ava sat down first and I joined her.
Yoath came up the steps from the basement, his face and arms covered
