Page 9 of The Alien's Major Dilemma

“Lube? Do you use oil-based lube? Did you plan to spend your entire mission oiling your pole?” She grinned at his discomfort and realized she’d gotten closer than she’d actually expected.

“The environments required for space travel are very dry,” he protested. “And oils transport better than creams. Do you make fun of people for using lotion?”

“Um, when they get the really slick ones and go through a bottle a week? Yeah, I do,” she said and laughed. “Especially when they combine it with a stash of sketchy pictures. There’s nothing wrong with a little self-love but some of them need a hobby.”

“Agreed,” he said, and the disgust in his voice made her giggle. “I understand that it’s a biological necessity for human males, but some of them didn’t think of anything else. It was all I coulddo some days not to shake some I was trying to listen to and tell them to get a girlfriend. A boyfriend. A sheep!”

“Dude, the sheep don’t deserve that.”

She giggled again at the look he gave her.

“And serves you right for eavesdropping. Couldn’t you have waited until they were done or something?”

“How would I have known without checking? And some of them thought about it while they were working on other things. How they got anything done sometimes is a mystery for the ages.”

“Then you got what you deserved,” she said. “How were you eavesdropping anyway if you could hear that but not when they were done?”

“I told you, I was scraping their minds.”

“What does that mean?”

“Skimming might be a better word for it but it always feels like I’m trying to take the top, kinda loose layer of the skin off their thoughts. The ones they’re thinking on purpose and almost broadcasting to the world in general. It’s how I learn languages and some basic customs.”

“Humans don’t broadcast their thoughts.”

“Humans don’t know that they’re broadcasting their thoughts,” he argued. “Because most of the other humans can’t pick them up. Some can, of course, and I don’t know why. There’s nothing that I’ve found so far that gives an actual answer.”

“Have you tried asking them?” Marissa asked.

“A couple,” he said. “Though it was easier when I could broadcast to them and skim the answers rather than try and ask outright.”

“What did they say?”

“That they just knew,” he said. “A couple of them had ideas but none of them had taken the time to build the disciplinenecessary to do it when they wanted to. Which meant they thought it was intuition and not something they had conscious control over.”

“And you do?”

Cooper nodded. “Part of being a Chelion. Hell, it’s part of the training to be a scout. I can’t imagine doing this without being able to read the thoughts of the people I’m trying to blend in with.”

“Did you ever listen in on my thoughts?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“What do you mean ‘not really’? Either you did or you didn’t.”

“I tried,” he admitted. “I tried and I didn’t get the ones I was looking for. Instead, I got the stuff that triggered a secondary maturation and a bond that I’m still not entirely sure what to do with.”

“You don’t know how second puberty works?”

“I don’t know how a kinetopsychic bond works with someone who has a wildly different anatomy than I learned about as a nymph. And how that’s going to impact my ability to work in enemy territory.”

Marissa’s cheeks flushed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“My people did and they built in enough safeguards that what happened with you should be impossible.”

“If it’s impossible, then maybe it will go away? Maybe it was a false positive or something and it will fade after a few days?”

Cooper laughed and it sounded bitter. “There’s no going back from this and, as much as I could wish everything else would be easier, I wouldn’t want to reverse it.”

---