The medical exams were as tedious and unpleasant as Jewel had expected, though less invasive and embarrassing than they were back on Earth thanks to the ship's advanced technology. They also, thankfully, showed no sign of any diseases or allergens they might transmit between one another.

Apparently, human saliva was slightly caustic and could cause a rash on Ra'homi skin if left in direct contact for more than an hour. And Jewel had previously discovered that Ra'homi blood was a particularly effective emetic to humans. Jewel made a note not to accept any blood transfusions from Kay in the future. But other than that, they were, in Kay's words, 'surprisingly compatible'.

With the tacit permission of the tests and after having erased the record of them from the computer, they took advantage of the medical table. Jewel was happy to make some more pleasant memories there.

It marked a rather significant change in their routine. Kay stuck to their previous schedule of testing and struggled to maintain a professional distance despite how thoroughly they'd destroyed it. But Jewel could tell when he was craving contact. He'd get restless, fidgeting, watching her hands, reaching for her without thinking and then quickly correcting himself. And now that she knew it was a physical need for him, as necessary as food or water, she hardly wanted to deny it to him.

She started with just taking his hand when she saw him getting antsy, the gentle rhythm of her thumb over his palm seeming to calm him. Over the course of a few days, he became more comfortable—or more desperate—and began to initiate touch more on his own, stroking her hair or pulling her into hugs. Before long, he was beginning each testing session by dragging her into his lap where she would remain, lounging against his chest or arm while she worked her way through endless boring intelligence tests.

Since Kay had given her the cabin, they'd been having the testing sessions there at the kitchen table. Jewel had also been sleeping there. Now that she wasn't just in an empty field, she had to admit the Earth habitat was more comfortable than most of the rest of the ship to her. But she still took her daily runs through the other habitats, all the more enjoyable now that Kay wasn't actively resisting the urge to touch her.

* * *

Jewel grabbed an overhanging branch and swung over a gap in the canyon floor, hitting the rocky ground running. The scrubby trees that grew in this habitat were deep red-black in color and grew twisted and tough from the rocky shale terrain. It was mostly flat except for the occasional crack and crevice, which meant Kay had been gaining on her since Jewel had entered. She could practically feel him breathing down her neck, and it made her skin tingle and her heart race, anticipation beating just below her stomach. She leaped another gap and felt his fingers brush her leg, almost snatching her out of the air. The near-miss sent a thrill through her.

"Computer, line up the Earth habitat!" she shouted, glancing back at him. She saw his teeth bared in a ferocious grin behind his helmet and almost stopped, eager to feel his claws sink into her. Instead, she put on another burst of speed, pulling ahead of him and racing for the far wall of the habitat. Just a little longer. She'd make him chase her just a bit more. She knew it would make the reward all the better.

The door out of the habitat opened in front of her, and she darted through it just ahead of him, crashing into the next module just as it settled into place. The sunlight of the Earth habitat greeted her just as she'd requested. She kept running, sprinting through the trees with the last of her energy. She burst through the tree line into the meadow, and a second later, Kay collided with her, driving her down and rolling into the soft grass. He pinned her face down in the soil, body heavy over her and breathing raggedly.

Her exosuit was already dissolving, and he wasted no time in tearing it off her. Neither of them had bothered to wear anything under the suits, and as soon as his helmet was no longer impeding his teeth, he sank them into her shoulder. Not hard enough to bleed, but enough to sting, to make her gasp, her back arching against him as the suit melted away, leaving their skin bare against one another. He was already hard. She could feel him sliding against her thighs. He jerked her hips up higher, keeping her head down in the grass.

After one of their races, she loved it exactly like this, rough and primal. The first few times they'd done this, he'd kept stopping to make sure she wasn't hurt or frightened. But she'd soon convinced him it was quite the opposite. She loved him like this. It felt more honest, more like him, than he ever did when he was keeping himself so carefully aloof and superior.

He removed his teeth from her shoulder, running his tongue over the offended flesh before he moved backward to use it elsewhere. Jewel gave a hoarse, euphoric shout, clutching the grass as he buried himself to his nose in her folds, tongue rolling against her clit and dipping inside her. It was fast and hard and exactly what she wanted, chest heaving from the run and from excitement as he devoured her.

Sometimes, even after he caught her, she'd fight him, enjoying the excitement of a good wrestling match, but he'd learned that as soon as he got his mouth on her, she melted into helpless, pliant prey, his for the taking. When she was soaked and trembling, babbling his name into the grass in desperation, he finally relented and loomed over her again, pressing her down with one hand as the other took her hip, pulling her back against him as he pushed into her.

She was so wet and ready for him that he slid in all at once with hardly any resistance, and she moaned in satisfaction. She couldn't imagine what she must look like, hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks and eyes unfocused with lust, face down in the dirt as she was mounted by a giant blue alien. She mentally upgraded him from giant to massive as his hips met her ass, the size of him stretching her until her head spun. And then he began to move, fast and feral, as hard and dirty as these encounters always were, plowing her into the grass with a force that made her body shake and her thoughts fly away. One hand dragged her hips back into his, making them meet with hard smacks of skin on skin. The other was under her, stroking circles over her clit to drive her wild with overstimulation.

She came, gasping, tightening hard around him, her vision spinning, but he was far from done. He pulled out just far enough to turn her over onto her back before crashing in again, continuing the same punishing pace with her hips raised above her head. Between the relentless pace of his thrusts and his hand on her mound, she came twice more in quick succession, toes curling at the almost painful overload of pleasure, one orgasm riding the other before she could catch her breath.

As she was coming down from the last one, she felt him throb within her, close to his end. He grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her up into his lap, holding him against her chest and letting his teeth rest against her throat as he thrust up into her hard, once, twice, three more times before he spilled himself within her, his seed warm and thick within her. She swooned against his shoulder as he held her there, lingering as pleasure washed over him. They stayed close, hanging on to one another as their ragged breathing slowed and they remembered how to behave like civilized creatures.

He kissed her gently as he pulled out, and they sank down onto the grass together, Jewel curled up still half on his chest.

"That was good thinking," he said, still a little breathless. "Telling the computer to move the Earth habitat to the next in line."

"Well, last time, you caught me in the middle of that swampy biome," she said, "And for a minute, I thought you were going to tear my suit off right there. It seemed like it'd be smart to put us somewhere we can both breathe the air."

"A very clever beast," Kay said, patting her head. "I should put that in your intelligence tests. Knows not to copulate in toxic foreign atmospheres."

"Well, I seem to have that one over you at least," Jewel said with a snort. "It's lucky Earth’s atmosphere isn't harmful to you."

"It is fairly similar to the Ra'hom home world," he confirmed. "The light and gravity are a little different. And of course, I'm fatally allergic to most of the plant life and particulates. Fortunately, Ra'hom medicine can suppress those kinds of reactions in almost all cases."

"Holy shit, you guys cured hay fever," Jewel said with a tired chuckle. "Humanity is going to love you for that, nothing else required."

"That reminds me," he said, sitting up slowly. "We are going to have to train you out of that kind of language."

"Why the hell would we have to do that?" Jewel asked, stretching out in the grass and enjoying the simulated sunlight on her skin. "Seems pretty damn stupid to me."

"I have been keeping the home world up to date on your testing," Kay replied. "I have even been sending periodic videos of the testing process."

"Including the cuddling?" Jewel asked without opening her eyes.

"No, not those," Kay admitted, clearing his throat. "Regardless, the general population is very excited by the potential discovery of other intelligent life. Certain members of the Peritas are very interested in seeing you."

"Peritas?" Jewel repeated, the telepathic doubling mangling the word with too much loaded context, struggling to find an English word that matched.

"They are the highest class of Ra'hom," Kay explained. "Those with the most highly trained skills and greatest achievements. Council members are exclusively chosen from the Peritas. A party of curious and impatient Perita have chartered a ship to meet the Diviner ahead of the Council meeting for the privilege of being some of the first to see you."

"How soon?" Jewel asked as she sat up quickly, suddenly worried. She hadn't been really keeping track of time. She didn't even know how much longer it would be until the Council meeting.

"A month," Kay answered. "We will have enough time to get you into shape."

She rolled her eyes and fell back into the grass.

"Are you a Perita?" she asked, curious. He looked pleased by the question.

"No," he said, and he picked her up, pulling her into his lap so that he could pick the grass out of her hair. "I may have been elevated to the Peritas if things had gone differently, but before my assignment here, I was Ingenuus. Military caste. The Perita can come from any caste, but they are rarely Ingenuus. We are often dismissed as being stupid and unskillful, good only for fighting. I may become a Perita yet for discovering you."

"You have a caste system?" Jewel asked, frowning. "Those are . . . kind of frowned on, where I’m from. How does it work in a meritocracy?"

"Well, they are not rigid classes," Kay said with a shrug. "Castes are assigned to help Ra'hom find the skills where they will excel to the best of their abilities. All one needs to move between them is an appropriate evaluation or achievement. Young Ra'hom usually try several castes before they settle. But still, there are certain stereotypes associated with every caste. It is not a perfect system, but I believe it does more good than harm."

"That's better than I can say about most human governments," Jewel said with a small laugh. "Still, it can't be that great if it landed you out here."

"There are always losers when it comes to politics," Kay said with a frown and set her aside as he stood. She got to her feet as he requested clothing from the computer and they both dressed, wandering back toward the cottage, Jewel a little bowlegged.

"I believe we have finished testing for the day," Kay said, looking at a tablet he'd summoned from the computer. "Tomorrow, we will begin preparing for the arrival of the Peritas. You should get some rest."

Jewel could see the reluctance with which he was preparing to leave and reached out to catch his hand.

"Why don't you stay for dinner?" she said, lacing their fingers. "There's no point in either of us spending the night alone."

"It is against protocol," he said reluctantly.

"As if everything we just did wasn't?" she said with a laugh. "We're aliens in a giant zoo in space having wild inter-species sex. There is no protocol for this."

He gave in and followed her indoors, sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table while she ordered ingredients from the computer. It still hadn't figured out how to give her whole meals or even complex ingredients like pasta or wine. It stubbornly refused to give her any kind of meat at all and was as baffled by the idea of tofu as it was by peanut butter and alfredo sauce.

But she'd managed to talk it through the creation of some staples like flour and oil to make cooking possible. And it had no trouble giving her plenty of fresh produce. It was lucky her mother had been the kind of traditionalist who'd insisted on teaching her how to cook. Jewel really hadn't cared when she'd been a kid, sitting impatiently through her mother's lessons, eager to return to running through the woods behind the house, climbing trees and looking for weird insects.

After her mother had died, Jewel had dug out all of her mother's old recipe cards and spread them out on the floor, realizing how many they'd never done, how many she had no idea how to do. She'd thrown herself into learning like she owed it to her mother to be as good a cook as she had been. She didn't think she'd ever manage it, but it was at least coming in handy now.

"You picked a good night to come for dinner," she said, taking a bowl from the 'refrigerator', which was actually just another cabinet that the computer had started chilling by unknown methods when Jewel had tried to explain what a fridge was. She had to assume the Ra'hom had some kind of refrigeration technology, but the computer always seemed to start from scratch with her.

"I made the dough for gnocchi last night," Jewel explained as she dumped out the dough and started rolling it out. "It's kind of a pain in the ass, especially with the computer. You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to get a potato ricer. But I was feeling nostalgic."

She cut enough pasta for the two of them and was frying it a moment later, talking or humming as she worked. Kay stayed quiet, watching her until she set a bowl in front of him.

"The basil and cherry tomatoes were easy, obviously," Jewel was saying as she sat down. "But the computer only finally figured out cheese yesterday. It's been more cooperative about bread too. I'm guessing it must have started processing early human civilization. Did you know cheese is one of the first foods we ever came up with? Back when we were still nomadic, someone put milk in a bag made from something's stomach and then took it for a walk in the sun. And the microbes from the stomach plus the milk and the heat made the first cheese. Gross, right?"

"Incredibly gross," Kay agreed, frowning. He was staring down at the bowl of pasta with a confused, concerned expression.

"What I don't understand," Jewel went on, eating gnocchi with her fingers, "is the vegetables. I mean, if it's processing in like, chronological order, shouldn't it be giving me the kind of vegetables and stuff that existed before humans figured out agriculture? Or did it figure out what plants humans eat before it started doing the cataloging history thing? I guess figuring out how to keep me alive was probably the first priority. But if it bothered to learn what a modern tomato looks like, why'd it take it so long to figure out bread? Whatever."

"You eat this?" Kay asked, his expression of concern growing. "What is this?"

"Pasta?" Jewel replied, not sure what was confusing him. "I mean, gnocchi is made of potato. I'm not sure what you're asking."

"And this," he said, picking at the cheese and making it stretch. "Am I to understand that this is made from intentionally fermenting the secretions of another species?"

"Yep," Jewel said, raising an eyebrow. "I mean, it sounds pretty gross when you say it like that, but it tastes really good."

"Why would you eat the secretions of another animal?" Kay asked, clearly baffled. "And why did you perform all those rituals with the potato? Why not just eat the potato?"

"Because it tastes better this way?" Jewel said, laughing. "Do the Ra'hom not cook?"

He winced as the telepathic doubling had a field day with the concept of cooking.

"No," he said after a moment. "No, we do not."

"Huh," Jewel said thoughtfully, popping a tomato into her mouth. "So you just . . . eat everything raw?"

"Until we developed nutritional supplements that could replace meals," Kay confirmed. "So that time spent hunting and eating could be put to more productive use. Humans seem to have found a way to make the whole process take even longer. It is so pointless."

"Well, we started cooking in the beginning to reduce the chance of disease and stuff," Jewel said. "Or to make a little food stretch further or to turn things we couldn't eat into things we could. Plus, things that taste good make us happy. Eventually, it became an art form. There are people who spend their whole lives inventing new ways to prepare and present food."

Kay shook his head, baffled.

"I thought humans might have unique crafts or techniques," he said. "I did not expect you to have entirely new art forms."

"I'm sure some Ra'hom artist will be competing in a reality TV cooking contest in no time," Jewel said with a laugh. Kay looked troubled by the thought.

She convinced him to try a piece of gnocchi but he flat out refused any contact with the cheese. He admitted, begrudgingly, that the tomatoes were better cooked with the basil than either ingredient raw on its own.

After dinner, they sat for a while, discussing their disparate cultures. Jewel was just relieved to finally know something about the Ra'hom. He'd seemed to almost actively avoid telling her about them before.

There were, as on earth, many different cultural groups on Ra'hom, though they were united under a single government. They even seemed to have the same kind of intersectional prejudice Jewel was unhappy to inform him also existed on earth, where certain cultural groups were pressured to join certain castes and some highly valued castes excluded individuals due to cultural background in spite of their achievements.

"It is despicable behavior," Kay said, "against everything we claim to stand for. Any Ra'hom should be able to prove himself through his actions. But there are those who will persist in believing that upbringing makes it impossible for an individual to achieve as much as others. As a result, those cultural groups are given fewer resources, since it is assumed they would not make as good use of them as others. And thus, they must work twice as hard as their peers to achieve the same things because they are starting from a disadvantage. And then the same groups that put them in this place of disadvantage claim that their inability to excel is proof of their inferiority. It is immensely frustrating."

"Tell me about it," Jewel said with a scoff.

"I am telling you about it," Kay said, and he didn't understand when Jewel laughed.

"Do you know," he said, "a member of my cultural group has never been a part of the Peritas? Not in the history of the caste."

"That sucks," Jewel said sympathetically.

"It is wrong," Kay said with a frown. "It is antithetical to all our principles that a person should be denied when their achievements prove their qualification."

He looked down, suddenly more serious than before, remembering something that made his expression turn bitter and grim.

"But it is too late to change it," he said. "The system has existed too long, and those in power have too cleverly reinforced it to keep things as they are, despite how it damages the rest of us as a species."

"The more I hear about the Ra'hom," Jewel said, "the more they sound like humans."

Kay looked up sharply, his expression briefly offended. Then he shook it off, standing up.

"We should rest," he said. "Tomorrow will be a long day."

Jewel stood to put their dishes in the sink, where the computer, in lieu of giving her soap or a dishwasher, just quietly erased them from existence and created new ones in the cupboard. Kay wavered near the table, looking at the door but hesitating to leave.

"The bed's big enough for two," Jewel said. "You don't have to leave if you don't want to."

He smiled gratefully, and Jewel felt her heart squeeze in her chest. She told herself it was just simple loneliness. Humans might be better at living alone than Ra'hom, but that didn't mean they enjoyed it. But it was getting harder to pretend that his smile wasn't important to her. It wasn't just that she wanted anyone in her bed tonight. She wanted him, even if she wouldn't admit it to herself yet.

They lay down, and Jewel curled up in his arms with a sigh. As much good as skin to skin contact seemed to do for him—he'd been markedly less grumpy since they'd started being together this way—it was just as good for her. But up until now, she'd always spent the nights alone. To finally put an end to that was an immense relief. Sleeping alone was something she hadn't cared for even back on Earth.

He put his arms around her, big enough that she felt surrounded by him, safer than she'd ever felt. It had been a good day, and a little later, when she realized she wasn't as tired as she'd thought she was and decided to burn off a little more energy, they ended it on the best possible note.

"Now I see why these things are flat," Kay said as she slid off him and they collapsed into sleep together.