___
S ARAH PULLED INTO the farm driveway in a dreary evening rain. The truck's windshield wipers slop-slopped back and forth, leaving a smeary trail in their wake. Better add new wiper blades to the list of things to buy, she thought. There was always some small thing to buy or fix on a farm.
At least the truck was still running smoothly under her dad's skilled hands. They used to have a second car back when her mom was alive, a newish Subaru that Mom used for commuting to her job in town. They'd had to sell it as crushing medical bills piled up on them, and now they were completely dependent on the aging truck. So far, none of her dad's project cars—acquired for free from neighbors, scattered around the farm in various states of disassembly—had yielded a second working vehicle.
Sarah shuddered at the thought of how close she'd come to losing the truck at the lake two nights ago. If Rei's ship had landed closer to shore—
But it didn't. It's fine. You couldn't have known.
It was so easy to forget about all this weirdness when she wasn't at the farm. Today had felt so normal. Like stepping through a portal, from the part of her world where Rei existed, to a world of normal classes and work, where the bright light at the lake on Saturday night was no more than a cause for idle speculation along with the latest international and political news.
As she stepped down from the truck and headed toward the farmhouse lights shining warm and bright through the rain, she could almost imagine the last two days had never happened at all. Aliens and spaceships! Maybe she really had lost her mind. Maybe it was all just a vivid dream.
But no. All she had to do was finger the little nodule behind her ear as a reminder. The headache had faded over the course of the day, helped along with some Motrin she'd borrowed from a classmate, but every once in a while it still sent a sharp twinge through her skull. This was real, all right, Rei and the implant and all of it.
"Dad?" she called, dropping the truck keys in the bowl on the kitchen counter, where they clattered among stray bolts and a detached carburetor. "Dad, I'm home."
The house was utterly quiet, the stove cold and dinner unstarted. He was obviously out on the farm somewhere.
Not in the barn, I hope! She'd left them both unattended all day. What Rei had been up to? She grabbed the sheepskin jacket off its hook and hurried out the door.
The lights were on in the barn. Whether that was a good or bad sign, she couldn't begin to guess. Surely Rei had the sense to stay out of sight? Sarah cautiously pushed the door open. Her dad liked to have the radio on while he worked, and she could hear country music coming tinnily from somewhere nearby.
Heart hammering, Sarah stepped into the barn, looking around. "Dad?" she called softly, then louder.
"Up here, punkin!"
The voice had come down from the loft. Sarah's heart hit triphammer levels. One of her dad's canes leaned against the wall beside the ladder. She scrambled up the rungs, her mind awhirl with all the terrible possibilities: Rei tied up while her dad called the police, Rei already packed away into police custody, her dad tied up while Rei held a laser gun on him ...
Instead, when her head popped over the top of the ladder, she beheld a scene of friendly tranquility. Rei and her dad had cleared away the hay and stored junk from the finished end of the loft—where the boards were solid and close together, without gaps between—and lit it up with several of her dad's bright shop lights. The two of them were sitting on the floor with the junk from Rei's ship spread out between them and an open toolbox by her dad's knee. The barn cat was curled up by Rei's leg, sleeping with one paw stretched out.
What the heck happened while I was gone?!
"Hi, sweetheart." Her dad waved at her cheerfully. "I made a new friend. Your friend too, right?"
"Right," Sarah said in a daze, turning to look at Rei. He smiled at her. "I, uh, see you two are getting along well."
"Looks like our mutual friend here got lost," her dad said. "We're seeing what we can do about that."
"So you, um ..." Sarah didn't know quite how to ask the question. She crouched down by Rei, draping her arms over her knees, and cleared her throat awkwardly. "Do you know Rei's an alien, Dad?"
"He's blue," her father said dryly. "And if that wasn't enough ..." He waved a hand over the pieces of spaceship junk spread out in front of him. "There's nothing like this on Earth. Not even in those newfangled computerized cars and miniature circuit boards. It's not that it's more advanced. It's just different. No way this was made here on Earth."
Of course it wasn't the presence of an actual alien that convinced him, but rather, the alien's technology. That was her dad, all right.
"You're taking this awfully well. I'm sorry I didn't tell you."
"I could tell something was bothering you, punkin. I just never woulda guessed what." He picked up one of the plastic scraps. It had an odd iridescent sheen. "How long's he been out here? Since Saturday night, that UFO at the lake?"
"Um. Yeah. Rei crash-landed his spaceship almost on top of me. The rest of the ship is at the bottom of the lake. We went out there again last night and picked up all this."
"Anybody else know about him?"
Sarah shook her head. "I've been keeping him as secret as I can."
Rei touched her coat sleeve.
"Yes?" she said. This close, she was acutely aware of all the subtle shades in his amber cats' eyes, the agatelike hints of blue and green, purple and gold.
"Lake," he said, followed by a couple of sentences in which she understood roughly every other word, out of order. He said it a couple of times.
"I'm sorry, Rei, I can't understand you."
"We were just waitin' on you, punkin," her dad said. "Blue here wants to run out to the lake tonight and get what I guess is the rest of whatever this all came from. We had to wait 'til you got back with the truck."
Rei nodded.
Sarah boggled at them both. "How can you understand him when I can't? I'm the one with the translator!"
"What's that, now?"
Sarah tilted her head and held her hair out of the way. "He put a translator in me, back here behind my ear. I'm starting to understand some of his language, but not most of it."
Gary scowled, his good humor evaporating. Rei looked startled when that scowl turned his way. "You put something in my daughter's head?"
"Whoa!" Sarah held her hands out with palms up for "stop!", noticing Rei's jerk—quickly covered—out of the corner of her eye. He definitely treated that as a threat gesture. She lowered her hands slightly. "Calm down. I agreed to it, Dad, it's okay. Really."
"Huh." Her father frowned at her. "Is that why you were off your feed last night? That thing hurting you?"
"Not much," Sarah said. She touched it, probing at the nodule with her fingertips. It hurt with a weird little zing! when she poked it the wrong way, but otherwise wasn't particularly sensitive. "It gave me a headache at first, but I feel okay now."
"Yeah, you better be okay." Gary pointed a thick, grease-stained finger at Rei. Sarah sensed Rei tensing up. "No more sticking alien doohickeys in my daughter's brain, got it?"
"Got it," Rei said.
It wasn't English—Sarah heard a lilting alien phrase while the translation unfolded in her mind—but Gary acted as if he'd understood anyway; he dropped his hand with a little headshake. "Good. Don't do it again."
"Did he give you a translator too?" Sarah asked him.
"Nope." Gary started gathering up his tools and putting them back into the box. "Hell, I used to work with ol' Lars all the time, the Mullers' hired fella, and he didn't speak a lick of English."
"Yeah ... but ..."
But he had a point. Sarah had grown up around Wisconsin farm folk, and half the people her dad called friends were men he hardly exchanged more than two grunts with. Working together in silence was their way.
Gary heaved himself to his feet with a huff of effort and the assistance of the one cane he'd brought to the loft with him. As he started to lean stiffly down to pick up the toolbox, Rei jumped to his feet and picked it up instead. Gary gave him a terse nod.
"What—are we going now?" Sarah protested. "Dad, I just got home. It's not even dark yet!"
"Soonest begun, soonest done," her dad said.
"Soonest arrested. Dad, there's cops all over at the lake. The last time Rei and I went out there, we had to go through a police barricade, and somebody spotted us poking around on the beach and sent a boat over to investigate. I had to take the back way home, through the fields." She paused, her mind drifting toward possibilities ... damn it. "We could get back the same way, if they haven't blocked it off. Which I bet they haven't. It's all private land out there, you just need to know which pastures to drive through ..."
"So let's hitch up the trailer," her dad said.
"No, wait!" Sarah blocked him at the top of the ladder. "Let's wait a little while, okay? Wait 'til everyone goes to bed tonight. We can do the chores and eat something and then go out to the lake. All right?"
Her dad glanced at Rei.
"It's better than being arrested," Sarah told Rei.
She wasn't sure how much of that he understood, but after a moment he said something her implant translated as, "All right."
***
Her dad heated up some chili from a few nights ago, while Sarah hurried through the chores in the rainy dark, then backed the truck up to their big feed-hauling trailer. She would wait and let her dad hook it up; he'd always been much better at lining up the tow hitch with the trailer than she was, and she usually pinched her fingers when she tried.
She came inside to be confronted with the disconcerting sight of Rei, blue-skinned and barefoot and looking completely out of place, at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the tin of shortbread cookies in front of him.
"You're giving him coffee?"
Her father shrugged.
Well, it wasn't like she hadn't been feeding him everything in sight. Coffee probably wasn't any worse for him than pie or cookies.
She hadn't really noticed in the barn, but seeing him in the kitchen made her realize how dirty he was. Which was understandable—he'd been sleeping in a hayloft and walking around barefoot in the mud—but now the thought occurred to her that maybe he didn't like to be dirty. She certainly wouldn't.
"Rei, would you like to take a bath?" she asked him. "Get cleaned up? You can borrow some more clothes from us, like that shirt you're wearing."
"Probably be a good idea," Gary said over his shoulder. "Draw attention less if he's dressed normal."
"Dad, he's blue. He's going to draw attention everywhere."
"Yes," Rei said. "I would like to get cleaned up."
"Hey, I understood every word of that sentence!"
Rei flashed another of those glimmering smiles, lighting his warm amber eyes. "Your language the implant will better understand hran ki your mind the more."
"Okay, there are still some grammar issues," she said, wincing. "Anyway, bath?"
Rei rose from the table and came with her obediently. He looked around with visible curiosity as she took him up the stairs. His eyes lingered on the framed photos hanging on the walls.
"Sarah?" he asked, fingertips brushing a photo of a small blonde girl sitting on the back of a horse.
"Yes, that's me. That's Dad," she added, indicating the bearded man holding the horse's head. "Dad. Gary. He doesn't have a beard anymore. And in that next picture, the woman pushing the little girl on the swing, that's me and ... my mom."
She finished in a whisper. After her mother's death, she had started to take down the pictures from the wall, and then, weeping, put them back up. Looking at them hurt, but putting them away made it like her mother had never existed. Like she didn't matter.
"She is beautiful," Rei said quietly. "Like you, she looks."
"Does she?" Sarah had never noticed. Maybe everyone with light pinkish skin looked alike to him.
But she'd been a teenager when her mother died, and perhaps she resembled her more as an adult. If her mother was alive today, maybe people would smile at them in stores in town and say, "You look like sisters!" Sarah had to blink the tears out of her eyes at the thought.
"She is dead?" Rei asked, his voice gentle.
"Yes," Sarah said, swallowing the lump in her throat. "She is dead. Are your parents still alive?"
Rei turned his face away. She wasn't sure if he didn't understand or just didn't want to talk about it.
"Anyway." She swallowed again, trying to push down the lump and the unshed tears that went along with it. "The bathroom is here. Do you have bathrooms in space? Well, you must. Actually ..." She hesitated and decided not to ask what he'd been using as a bathroom while he was staying in the barn. Probably a corner of the field, and it wasn't like cow pastures were known for being immaculately clean. "Anyway, I don't know what yours look like, but this is the, uh ... toilet, for—doing your business in—you know, pooping—"
She had no idea what the translator was doing with all of this, but one thing she knew for sure, from the heat in her cheeks, was that she'd started blushing. Rei looked a little extra blue himself. "I know what it is for," he said.
"Oh. Good. Well, that's for ... that, and then this is for washing your hands ..." She turned on the sink faucets to demonstrate. "And this is the bathtub. This is how you turn the water on and off, see? This knob is for the shower." She pulled; water sprayed. Rei gazed up curiously at the shower head. "What else do you need to know, let's see. Oh, these are soap and shampoo, for getting clean—what are you doing?"
"Mehetesk'a my clothes," Rei said, pausing in the act of unsealing the strips along the side of the gray garment. He looked baffled, while Sarah was pretty sure her blush was flaming all the way up to her hairline. "Do your people wash with the clothes on?"
"No, but we don't take our clothes off around other people." Even as she said it, a part of her brain wailed plaintively, Why did you stop him?! She was now vividly remembering the beach, and the flex of his smooth muscles under the blue skin as he'd gone in and out of the water. She could have had an up-close view of that, under good lighting ...
"No?" He hesitated, fingers on the strip-seal.
"No," Sarah said decisively, wrenching her eyes up to his face. "I'm—I'm gonna go get you some clothes, all right? Oh! This is a towel." She yanked a fluffy towel off the rack and thrust it at him. "For drying off with."
She left him holding the towel and fled the bathroom before her blush could cause her hair to spontaneously combust. She was into her dad's room before she realized she'd given him her towel, but, well, she'd only used it for this morning's shower, so ... that wasn't too weird, right?
Right.
As she rummaged through her dad's closet for anything that looked like it would fit a larger, more muscular alien, she listened to the sound of water running next door, and tried not to think of Rei with his clothes off, one thin wall away.
Peeling off the silvery-gray jumpsuit, exposing his wide shoulders and lean blue hips, the dark curls across his belly that were so like a human man's, tapering down to ...
"Gahhhh!" She tossed a wad of bundled-up clothing onto the bed. She really should be looking for underwear too, but while she didn't mind rummaging around in her dad's closet, poking through his underwear drawer was really a bit much. Plus, she'd have to think about everything those boxers would be wrapped around ...
Sarah whimpered quietly and left her dad's room with the bundle of clothing in her arms. She paused in front of the bathroom door.
The sound of running water had stopped. Now there was just a little bit of splishing and splashing, which was even worse. She could picture him all too easily, stretched out in the bathtub, lean and long and blue. And then he'd be pulling himself out of the water, strong arms flexing—reaching for the towel, her towel, that she'd just rubbed all over her naked body this morning, and wrapping it around his long blue waist—
Sarah swallowed thickly and tapped on the door before cracking it open. Warm air came out, along with the citrusy smell of shampoo—oh no, he was using her shampoo, too. She took in a brief flash of blue as she pushed the clothes through the door. "Clothing!" she said, and shut the door quickly, stifling her urge to open it wider instead.
Rather than going back downstairs and facing her dad just yet, she fled into her bedroom and closed the door firmly.
Being back in her lifelong bedroom, home of all her teenage dreams and fantasies, didn't do as much to quell the lust surging in her as she'd hoped. She wanted to turn right around and walk back into that bathroom and ...
And what? she told herself. He's an alien! He might not even know what sex is! For all you know, his people reproduce using test tubes!
But then she thought of the warm light in his amber eyes, the sideways looks, the way he smiled at her sometimes ...
Oh, Rei knew what sex was, all right.
You've known him for two days, she told herself, rational brain still struggling to assert itself over lust-brain. You haven't even been able to have a conversation with him—
And yet, she already felt as if she knew everything important about him. He was intelligent and resourceful and determined, even on an alien planet surrounded by people whose language he didn't speak. He was careful not to hurt her and respectful of her personal space. He was a little shy, but more than willing to take charge when he needed to.
He was drop-dead gorgeous, with a beautiful smile and shoulders to die for ...
Sarah flopped down on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, where little glow-in-the-dark stars were scattered in random constellations. Stars like the ones Rei came from.
She unbuckled her jeans and slid her hand inside them.
Unsurprisingly, she was wet to the touch. An electric shiver went through her as she stroked herself.
In the quiet of her room, she could hear the little splashes from the bathroom across the hall as Rei shifted around in the bathwater.
With vividness that shocked her, she pictured herself opening the bathroom door, Rei stretched out naked in the water, turning to look at her with those clear amber eyes. She saw herself close the door behind her and peel out of her jeans.
She could see the way Rei's eyes would widen with delighted surprise, his catlike pupils expanding and darkening ...
She slid one finger inside, then another.
She saw herself straddle him in the bathwater, slipping one leg inside the tub. Rei arched to meet her, his erect cock rising from a nest of dark curls. Like a human, but big. Huge.
A third finger joined the other two, pressing against her hot, wet walls.
Behind the darkness of her closed lids, she saw Rei pushing up into her, his hands clasping her shoulders to hold her steady as he thrust upward to fill her. Water splashed around them ...
Her breath quickened, her thumb stroking over her engorged clit, sliding between her folds as her fingers pressed inside. She spread her legs involuntarily, swallowing back a moan.
Rei's golden eyes were watching her as he thrust into her, his breath coming in a gasp with each thrust ...
In her mind's eye, Sarah bent her head down to kiss him, her curly hair falling on either side of her face. He rose up to kiss her, and as his lips met hers, they were just as warm and inviting as they looked.
She shivered into an orgasm with her mouth parted to receive an imaginary kiss, her eyes clenched shut and Rei's imagined taste on her tongue. The waves swept through her and when she finally shook her way out the other side, fingers buried deep in herself, it was not so much relief she felt as a desperate yearning to have Rei's arms wrapped around her in reality as well as fantasy, Rei's strong blue body pressed against hers.
Sarah pulled her fingers out of herself and sat up. She was still shivering with aftershocks. Her jeans were down around her knees.
I have a crush on a shipwrecked alien.
It was like a bad headline from those silly teen magazines she used to read.
Sarah quickly pulled up her underwear and fastened her jeans. It wasn't shame she was feeling so much as something else, something that was huge and warm and terrifying at the same time.
The moment she'd met Rei, her life had been swept out of her control, and now she was careening downhill on a runaway roller coaster, with no idea what was waiting for her at the bottom. And yet she was having the ride of her life.
She couldn't wash her hand in the bathroom because Rei was in there. Guiltily she wiped her fingers on several tissues and poked them into the bathroom trash can before going downstairs.
Her dad was in the living room, sitting at the computer. "Just need to fill in a few entries in the farm books, punkin," he said over his shoulder. "Dinner's hot when you and Blue are ready."
"His name's Rei, Dad!"
Her father grunted and turned back to the computer.
With relief, she hurried into the kitchen and washed her hands at the sink. It was easy to wash away the evidence, but not nearly so easy to ignore the slick feeling between her thighs and the hot lassitude in her limbs that was one part post-orgasmic relaxation and one part heightened lust, tingling through her whenever she thought of Rei toweling himself off upstairs.
To distract herself, she retrieved her phone from the bowl of rice where it had been drying out on the counter, with its charging cord trailing incongruously from the rice to the nearest outlet. She braced for disappointment and pressed the power button.
Victory! The screen came on right away. It had a few scuffs that hadn't been there before, but she'd happily take it. No need to go to the Verizon store the next time she was in town.
She dropped the phone in her pocket, and got busy dishing up the chili into three bowls and setting out garlic bread that her dad had been keeping warm in the oven.
When she turned around, Rei was standing in the kitchen doorway.
He was wearing an old sweatshirt of her dad's, the biggest thing she'd been able to find for him; though Rei wasn't enormous, his broader shoulders had strained at the seams of her dad's work shirt. His hands were shoved in the pockets, and his thick dark hair was wet and tousled.
He looked young, and cute, and vulnerable, like a freshly showered college kid instead of an intergalactic cyborg assassin or whatever he was.
After a moment of mutual staring, Sarah managed to boot up the less shallow part of her brain. "Hey!" she said brightly. "Dinner's ready. I don't know if they have chili in space—oh, what am I saying, of course they don't, but I bet there's something similar. It's beans, er, legumes, and meat and spices. And there's bread."
"It smells good," he said quietly, sitting down.
The translator, she was beginning to understand, did best with short, simple sentences. And Rei had been trying to speak that way, probably because he knew how the technology worked and was trying to make it easy for it.
There was something else different about him. It didn't click until she went to put the chili pan in the sink and turned around. Rei was turned away from her, reaching for the garlic bread and exposing the long line of his neck, wet black hair curling at the indigo nape above a slightly paler streak across the skin—
"Your collar's gone!"
Rei looked over at her. "Garymetzger helped me cut it off."
"Dad? His name's just Gary." She sat down across from him and picked up a piece of garlic bread to give her fingers something to do and stop them from twitching to touch the exposed soft skin above the sweatshirt's collar. "Metzger is our last name. Surname. Uh, family name. Do your people have those? A name that everyone in your family has?" Do you?
"Me? Just one name, Reian."
"Rei ... An?"
His smile glimmered; the dimple appeared briefly. "Reian. One name. Rei is a short name. Long name and short name. My people hrsaka keth. But not a ... family name."
"Oh, like a nickname? We have those. I mean, I don't, personally. Sarah is short enough as it is. But my mother's name was Margaret, and everyone called her Maggie."
"Maggie May," her father said quietly from the doorway.
He limped inside, using one cane and his hand on the wall for extra balance. "Maggie May. Like the Rod Stewart song. Her middle name wasn't May, of course."
"No," Sarah said softly. "I know that part. I'm named after her."
Gary nodded. "Margaret Sarah was her name ... but Maggie May was what I called her." He glanced at Rei, who was watching both of them, amber eyes flicking back and forth between, and forced a smile. "But we're being rude, talking about people our guest doesn't know."
Which meant stop talking about your mother. Sarah dropped her eyes and reached for her spoon. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rei studying what she did, and then carefully picking up his spoon in a clumsy approximation of her grip.
As they began eating in silence, she thought about how long there had been an invisible third person at their table: the ghost of her mother.
Now there really was a third person, a man from beyond the stars. And still the ghost was there, eating with them, following them around, a silent presence in their lives.
What does it take to move on? Sarah wondered, forcing down a mouthful of the chili that tasted like sawdust to her now. How did you learn to move beyond that, when you'd lost the person you'd loved most? It had been ten years since her mother died, and yet sometimes, for both her father and herself, it seemed as if it was only yesterday.
She raised her eyes to watch Rei eating quietly, looking at neither of them. The paler stripe across his neck was visible when he moved, appearing and disappearing above the neck of the sweatshirt. Sometimes his empty hand drifted up toward his neck, apparently without his conscious will, only to be jerked back down when his fingers touched his bare skin.
She still wanted to touch him, but less for her own sake than for his. She couldn't help wondering how many people he'd lost, and what kind of tragedies were hidden behind his golden gaze.