JAY FRETTED, RANTED, AND APOLOGIZED at a mile a minute throughout the short cab ride back to our office. I barely heard him as I stared unseeingly out the window.
Once back at the Herald, I went through the motions of pretending to be working for the rest of the day.
I snapped out of my scared, confused, comatose stupor at 5:30 p.m. when I received the long-awaited but now unwelcome text message from Vair inviting me to come back to his club that night. I texted him back that I wasn’t his property, stating in all caps that I would never in this fucking lifetime be his charl.
He didn’t respond.
I waited ten minutes before shooting off another angry text telling him that I wasn’t interested in being bitten and fucked to death as his sex-lab rat either.
No reply.
I wanted to call him out as a fraud and a liar, but it occurred to me that Vair had been telling me the truth for the most part—in Vair-speak—all along. And that only made me more upset.
So I sent another text saying that if he ever came within 300 feet of me again, I’d appeal this bogus charl business at the highest level within the Krinar Council—even though rationally I knew they wouldn’t give a damn about my rights or about helping me.
I didn’t hear from Vair all weekend.
I continued to send him angry texts. I barely slept in that time, and I neurotically checked my phone for a reply from him.
At night I laid awake in my bed, contemplating what satisfaction I might get out of charging back to his club and screaming at Vair to go to Krinar hell in person. But those fantasies somehow always took a wrong turn as they played out in my mind’s eye, often culminating with me shackled to an animated glass wall or a Saint Andrew’s cross in the x-club basement and screaming at Vair for other reasons entirely.
So I didn’t go back to Vair’s club that first weekend.
But Jay did. He went to see Shalee.
He said he intended to question her about the xenophile fatalities Stephen had told us about. But beyond that, he said that he wanted to understand how Krinar saliva worked in the human system as an aphrodisiac-slash-narcotic in order to determine, as he put it, if the most profoundly intense sexual experience of his life was about Shalee, or just her spit.
When he stopped by my office on Monday morning to catch me up on how his visit to the club had gone, our editor and boss, Richard Gable, was just leaving, having delivered a rare “job well done” on the article I’d turned in that morning about the potential future perils of the Ks’ forced vegan diet.
“Top shelf, Myers! I really do miss my bacon.” He clapped Jay on the shoulder as they passed. “Afternoon, Jay.”
Jay gave him a fake bright smile and returned, “Afternoon, Dick,” just like he always did. And like every other time, Gable reminded him that Dick was his father’s name, and that he went by Gable or Richard.
It was the most juvenile, stupid gag, but something in Jay’s delivery each time kept it from getting old. I shook my head and smothered the smile breaking out on my face behind my hand until we were alone and Jay had closed my office door.
Jay had texted me on Sunday night to check in and let me know that he was okay, saying that he was too tired to talk but would fill me in at work the next day. Judging by the satisfied, relaxed expression on his face and the bounce in his step as he’d entered my office, it seemed that he’d had a good visit to Vair’s club.
I pushed thoughts of Vair and my own feelings of hurt aside and asked, “So? How’d it go with Shalee?”
“Great. And before you ask, Mom, the answer is no, she didn’t bite me again.”
That was a relief. I had made Jay promise not to indulge in another K bite after what we’d learned from Stephen.
“But we did do other things.” Jay’s grin widened, and the most adorable flush crept up his neck to his cheeks. “And I think … I think maybe the chemistry we have is about more than just spit.”
After gushing about Shalee for ten minutes, he went on to relay what she’d told him about the fatalities that had happened at the x-clubs near K Centers. Shalee had explained that because so few Krinar and human mate pairings existed on Krina, little was known at the time of the invasion two years ago about how often or how much Ks and humans should indulge in blood and saliva sharing. And unfortunately, not enough research had been done since, prior to Vair’s team arriving in NYC.
She told Jay that in the case of a true mate pairing between a Krinar and a human, the Krinar’s love for their charl would naturally prevent them from overindulging out of concern for their charl’s human frailty. But in the case of these more casual x-club encounters, there was often less thought given to safety, because actions were driven by pure lust, and judgment clouded by bite-induced delirium.
And in the absence of a bond connection, the humans going to these clubs would sometimes hook up with multiple Ks per night, thus having too much blood taken, too frequently. This explained the need for an x-club enforcer like Tauce—a K terrifying enough to hopefully scare the most overindulgent xenos from coming back, in order to save them from themselves.
Shalee said that the answer was more research and stricter regulations moving forward, confirming what Stephen had told us.
“Listen, baby girl, I know you’re upset and you feel betrayed. And believe me, I was ready to punch Vair out over that archaic charl alien ownership shit when Stephen told us about it on Friday, but after talking to Shalee, I think maybe being on the charl list isn’t as bad as it seems.”
“Jay, he claimed me as his property!”
“Yeah, to protect you from both his government and ours, and to let you have your journalism success, which you never would’ve had otherwise since both the Council and our government were planning to put the kibosh on your x-club piece.”
“Are you listening to yourself? Like I give a damn about journalism success if it comes at the price of my freedom as a human being.”
He rolled his eyes. “Right. But Amy, look around you. You’re sitting in your office, you just wrote another K article for the Herald, and you’re going to go home to your apartment tonight just like you’ve done for the past seven nights, not to mention the past nine weeks, with no interference and virtually no contact from Vair—other than the one time he made you go to his x-club.”
These were all valid points that should’ve made me feel better. But for some reason, I felt even more deflated.
“He fixed my eyesight without even asking me!” I indicted.
“Oh, what a villain.” Jay raised one brow at me. “Face it, you’re not exactly being treated like a prisoner. Come to think of it …” He winced and sucked air through his teeth. “The guy left you alone for nine weeks, even after he’d claimed you as his charl. Yikes.” He shook his head, giving me a phony pitying look. “If anything, maybe you should be concerned that he only did it to be nice and he’s just not that into you.”
I wasted no time calling Jay out for his obvious K-sympathizer matchmaking attempts as he succumbed to a fit of laughter. I told him I was happy for him about Shalee, but that he needed to get his lovesick ass out of my office before I pulled the big 3-prong hole puncher on him.