Page 31 of What Makes an Alien a Dad?

Sadly, all she had now was Kear.

Standing in the middle of the workroom in his apartment, he kept staring at her letter displayed on the screen of the house drone that hovered in front of him. The foreign words of Maya’s mother tongue looked like strings of an unsolved puzzle to him. But their meaning still rang in his mind, echoing his translator implant.

Maya wasn’t happy.

She needed reassurance. Some kind words. A letter from the man she loved. The letter that only Kear could write for her now.

The problem was that Kear hadn’t written a love letter in his entire life. He’d never received one either. The closest to a love letter he’d ever gotten were the notes of appreciation from his patients. None of which would do in this situation.

“Find a love letter template.” He barked at the AI.

“Sorry, the request cannot be completed,” came the reply.

It appeared the people on his planet didn’t take shortcuts with their romantic communication. Which meant he’d have to write one from scratch.

“Fine. Find some love letter examples, then.” He scratched at the base of his horns and amended, “Are there any from Earth?”

As an Earth woman, Maya would respond better to the style of her home planet, he figured.

“The archives of the Liaison Committee now include a collection of books and movies in several languages from Earth,” the AI informed him. “Would you like me to pull quotes from works in the romance genre?”

“Yes, please.” He had to start somewhere.

He stared at the screen as it filled with strings of text. The screen glowed softly, extending from the shiny disk of the drone.

What did Maya say was the pet she had as a child?

“What is a dog?” he asked the AI.

Pictures of four-legged animals appeared on the screen as the drone read the descriptions out loud. The images differed vastly, depending on the breed. But overall, the dog creature had a tail and was covered with fur. And it looked nothing like his drone.

He shook his head. Women in general were hard to understand. Maya being a human added an extra layer of enigma for him.

“Alright, let’s hear the love quotes,” he said to the drone, getting rid of the dog pictures.

“I love you against my better judgment,” the AI read.

“I love you” was a good start for a love letter, he supposed, but the overall meaning of the sentence seemed rather offensive. It implied the man didn’t want to love the woman. That he thought it unwise. Personally, Kear agreed with him—love certainly was an imprudent emotion. But the quote didn’t fit with Maya’s situation.

He frowned, rubbing his neck. “Is there anything else?”

“I can’t live without you.”

“Well, that’s a blatant lie.”

He knew for a fact that no one died from rejection or separation. Every male in his family, other than him, had been rejected by a woman, some many times over.

His mother chose another man over his father, even though they remained friends, and she agreed to carry Kear and his brothers for him. One of Kear’s brothers dated a woman for three years before she declined his marriage proposal. The other brother had dated at least ten women in his life. He’d proposed to them all and had been rejected by every one of them.

The odds just weren’t in men’s favor in Voran. That was the main reason Kear had decided long ago not to even try courting anyone. He was perfectly content with his life, free of heartache. Never in a million years would he have thought he’d need to write a love letter one day.

“Anything else?” He prompted the next quote.

“I’ll die for you.”

“What?” He barked a laugh.

What good would a man’s dying do to the woman he loved? How was his death supposed to make her happy?

---