“YOU CAN’T WEAR THAT.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll look like a young MILF who got lost on her way to PTA night.”
I rolled my eyes and held the next dress option up in front of me. “This one?”
Jay made a retching sound. “Are you going to a wedding or a sex club? I’ve said it before, I don’t believe in puce.”
I groaned and fished the last of my dress options from my TJ Maxx shopping bag. “How about this?”
Jay made a “meh” noise and gave it a “so-so” hand gesture. “I need to see what it looks like on. My hunch is that if Diane von Fürstenberg and Tory Burch had a bastard lovechild who designed cheap, slutty wrap dresses for Bebe, that’s about what we’ve got here.”
I flung it onto the chair next to his bed and tossed my hands in defeat. “Well, I’m out of options.”
“Because you insisted on shopping where there were no options.”
Jay had wanted me to go somewhere trendy in his Soho neighborhood to shop, saying he envisioned me “braving Vair’s club wearing an edgy, slinky, minimalist, bodycon Helmut Lang-esque number”—aka something way too expensive for my budget.
And given the fact Vair had torn the nicest clubbing dress I’d owned to shreds, along with my bra and panties, the last time I’d gone to his club, I was not about to spend half of my paycheck on a designer dress that might suffer the same fate.
So I’d purchased six dresses from TJ Maxx instead, and I planned to take them all back—ideally, even whichever one I wore tonight to the club if I could manage to hide the tags.
“Did you get in touch with your friend at the CIA?”
“No, but I confirmed with a mutual friend that he does work there, and I got his number and left him a message.”
It was progress, I supposed, but not all that comforting, given we’d be back at Vair’s club in less than five hours. Anything could happen to us tonight and no one would be the wiser.
“And while you were out making substandard dress selections, I brainstormed some K interview questions.” Jay pulled his phone from his pocket. “Wanna hear them?”
I really didn’t. “Sure. Lay ’em on me,” I said brightly instead.
My stomach was in knots. I’d barely eaten all day.
I’d stopped in at my apartment after shopping to pick up my makeup bag, a selection of shoes, and other necessary essentials for getting myself ready at Jay’s place. I hadn’t been able to shake the paranoia that I was being watched the entire time I’d been there. It was nerve-wracking to think I might never feel a sense of privacy even in my own home ever again.
Jay sat on the edge of his bed and read from his iPhone. “What are the Krinar’s ultimate plans for us as a society?”
I made a face. “Pass. Reasonable question; too vague and easy to dance around answering. Besides, they obviously don’t want us to know all of their intentions. Highly doubtful we’ll get any worthwhile answer out of a K to that one.” I could already envision Vair deflecting such a question with humor and sexual innuendo. “Next?”
“Why intervene and insert yourselves into our society now if you’ve had the ability to do so for thousands of years? If you were concerned about the health of our planet, why didn’t you come to its rescue sooner in order to head off further damage being sustained?”
“Exactly!” I nodded. “Why indeed? I like it, but Ks aren’t likely to answer that one either. Maybe we should start with x-club-related questions and try to pepper others into the convo as we can?”
“We?” He shook his head. “Baby girl, I’m afraid you’re on your own with this. I’m dying to interview a K, but Vair was clear about only you doing the interviewing at his club.”
Naturally. “Fine. I’ll start with x-club-related questions. Got any of those?”
“Do I evah,” he sing-songed. “Here’s one that I wrote for Vair: It’s rumored that more and more humans are frequenting your x-club. Many humans have shared stories on online forums about how addictive the experience of being bitten and having their blood sucked by a Krinar alien is. Is drinking human blood equally addictive for a Krinar?”
“Nice. Definitely an important, key question.” Professionally and personally. And it was possible Vair or other Ks would entertain that one and perhaps provide some response from which I’d be able to extract a half-truth or two.
“You’ll like this next one for Vair even better. While the Krinar continue to preach the merits of veganism and have strong-armed the entire planet into a predominantly vegan lifestyle, you’ve established an exclusive club where Krinar may access the fresh blood of willing humans—because apparently, the Krinar version of ‘veganism’ includes the blood of mammals? Care to explain that hypocrisy for the human public?”
I giggled and bounced in place on the balls of my feet. “I’ll have to tone it down a bit, but I love it. What else?”
“How many other women have you been with in the past nine weeks?”
“Jay!”
“What?” He looked up from his phone with a devious grin. “Okay, so I admit that as I was writing these, they somehow became a bit more Vair and Amy hook-up specific than general K and x-clubber questions.” His finger tapped and scrolled down the screen. “Let’s see … I’ll just skip over the next few,” he said with a chuckle. “We can come back to the ones about how your blood tastes later.”
“Ew! Not funny.”
Jay got his laughter under control, cleared his throat, and continued. “I’ve heard that Krinar can be highly possessive. Does that mean that Krinar pair off and mate for life like penguins, coyotes, and termites?”
I covered my face with my hands.
“What does it mean when a Krinar says that they’re going to ‘take great care of someone’ for all eternity? Is that like a Krinar euphemism for engaging in an extended sexual encounter?”
“Oh, my God.” I flopped down onto the chair laden with my “substandard” dress choices. “I am not asking those questions. Let’s move on. How about asking about their language? Or about how they’re capable of understanding all of our languages so readily? Or questions about their technology and whether they ever plan to share any of those advances with us?”
Or if they intend to just keep using them against us—for control, intimidation, general spying, and the occasional sex tape compilation.
“Lame and lamer. Consider the venue, Amy. We’re not meeting up at an Apple store. You’re interviewing Vair and other horny Ks in a sex club. Besides, Vair said no boring, safe questions would be answered.”
“What?” I jerked upright in my seat. “You talked with Vair while I was out?”
“Texted again.”
“I wanna see!” I demanded, reaching for the phone in his hands. “Show me the texts from this morning, too.”
“I’d show you, but they’ve been erased.”
“Bullshit.” I jumped up and snatched the phone right out of his hands. “Why would you erase them?”
“I didn’t. Vair did. Or something did. Because they disappeared seconds after I read them.”
I scrolled through his recent text messages and confirmed that it was true.
“It’s something with their technology, I’m sure.”
“No doubt,” I muttered, nodding absently. A new wave of anxiety curled in my gut as I heard my mother’s voice in my head. They wouldn’t want to leave evidence behind of how they lured two unsuspecting human reporters to their beheading.
I shook it off internally. I couldn’t afford to go there. I had to trust Jay’s instincts on this. And Jay seemed certain that we’d be safe tonight at Vair’s club. I knew enough to know that my own instincts were flawed—warped by years of my mother’s constant fearmongering and “sky is falling” proselytization.
I’d seen a therapist about it in college. Being at school and away from my mom’s influence for the first time had made me recognize just how poor my ability to judge the inherent danger of situations was. I’d learned in therapy that kids who were raised to fear everything in life were more likely to be victimized as adults—because being taught to see danger everywhere in the world, including places and situations where there was none, left them with no reasonable gauge for identifying true danger when they were faced with it.
According to my therapist, when danger becomes normalized, people stop hearing their intuition, until eventually there’s not enough gut distinction and reaction to be able to differentiate between the nebulous daily “sky is falling” threats and the obvious-to-everyone-but-you-creeper-at-the-bar-blatantly-plotting-to-roofie-your-drink threat.
My therapist had also cautioned me that sometimes those who were raised to see fear everywhere became subconscious thrill-seekers or “adrenaline junkies” in adulthood.
Knowing my instincts might be faulty, I relied on observation and fact as much as possible. And on the instincts of others around me whom I trusted.
Jay had been adamantly against the idea of me going to investigate and report on x-clubs the night that we’d first gone searching for one, at my insistence, in the meatpacking district. But once we’d gotten in and were standing face to face with Vair within the entryway of his club, it was I who had become half-immobilized by fear and shock, while Jay had warmed to the situation, his instincts reassuring him that the threat was not as great as he’d initially feared. And he’d been right.
That time, my mother’s voice warned in my head.
I handed Jay his phone and stood silently by the bed, lost in my own thoughts.
“You wanna text him for yourself and see?” he offered after a beat, awkwardly extending it back out to me.
“Oh, no,” I declined. “Definitely not.”
“I could give you his number and you could use your own phone to text—”
“I’m good!” I snapped, then caught myself. “Sorry. Can we just veg out for a while? Watch a movie or something? I need to get my mind off things.”
“Sure. I got Men in Black, Alien vs. Predator, Independence Day—”
“You’re about to be strangled with a puce dress.” I tackled him on the bed as he erupted with laughter.