Page 40 of Married to the All Hallows' Eve Alien

“Yes, a bottle of white?” she suggests.

“Yes, you choose.”

“I don’t want you to be left out with your food.”

I look at her blankly.

“Perhaps you could order fish too?”

I remember now. Human food is so specific with tastes they like to order food and wine that match one another. “Yes, I’ll decide on something else.”

“I’m glad you’re not a picky eater.”

“I’m not picky about food, no.” I look up from my menu and make eye contact with her. Her cheeks are flushed. She understood my meaning completely. So, to make myself very clear, I also slowly lick my lips. Just before I’m about to say something that would rack up a lot of fines if we were in the Empire, our waiter appears.

A young Greek man with floppy hair and a white uniform. “Welcome. May I offer you a cocktail to begin?”

I remember Ivy saying she was hungry. “I think we’d like to order now.”

“Certainly,” he removes a white paper pad and a pen. “For Madame?”

Ivy says what she’d like, and then he looks at me. I hesitate. I was so enamored watching Ivy in real life, not through a screen, that I forgot to find another fish dish. I name the bottle of wine we’d like and then ask the waiter to recommend me a dish. He does so, and I agree. Now, I get to sit across from Ivy in this wonderful location and enjoy these hours of life. These are the hours that make all the other more difficult ones worth it.

* * *

After a very human meal with too many tastes for my liking, Ivy asks me, “Are you going to have dessert?”

“I normally don’t have dessert. I don’t know if I like sweet foods..”

“I’m sweet,” she says very provocatively, “you can try me.”

Perhaps because it’s the wine or watching Ivy hold her wine glass with my bracelet on her arm and knowing, as Caroline reminded me often enough, I’m alone here that I’m inclined to at least taste Ivy. Neither the High Council nor the High Priestess knows what I do on Earth. Only the goddesses, but even they’d understand. They introduced Ivy to me a long time ago, and if it weren’t for the GC and Alliance Force laws, we’d already be married.

“I guarantee you’ll only taste like a woman on my tongue, and I may not like sweet things, but I enjoy the taste of a good woman.”

“Then why are we still here?”

I raise my hand, and when the waiter comes over, I say firmly, “We’d like the bill, please.”

Twenty

Ivy

I put my hand in Sem’s large one as we return to the hotel. I’m glad he knows the way because all these white buildings and stone pathways look exactly the same to me. I feel so safe with him. He’s so big and tall people move out of the way for him, but I think it’s also because he has an air about him as a man who has seen terrible things. I felt his eyes were elsewhere a few times during dinner, remembering a memory. I felt special, though, that I could always bring him back to the present. He says we are meant to be, and maybe we really are. It feels perfect being here with him now like all the hard work of talking to each other daily since we met has finally paid off.

I’m more than ready to take this relationship to the next level. I just hope he doesn’t change his mind before we get back to the hotel room. It’s refreshing to be with a man who isn’t rushing me.

We enter the hotel, and I find my key, but he takes me in a different direction. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t get rooms next to one another. Let’s go to my room.”

I consider this only for a second. There’s no reason I shouldn’t. It’s the same hotel.

We get to his room, and he opens the door. The room is very similar to mine, except his private pool has a slightly different view of the ocean and island. It looks very romantic at night with all the lights in the buildings.

Sem doesn’t ask me if I need to use the bathroom. He just tells me, “Here’s the bathroom.” I find this odd, but he’s not wrong. I do need to go. When I finish, I look at my reflection in the mirror. I have dark circles under my eyes, no doubt from traveling, and no amount of makeup is going to hide that. But it doesn’t matter. Sem has seen me in all states over the phone.

But then I remind myself what he said at the restaurant about eating me out, and I feel slightly tingly between my legs. And he said that when I looked exactly like this. I have nothing to worry about.

* * *

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