Page 4 of Delivered to My Alpha Alien Lovers

I nearly choked on my sandwich as I got to the steamy questions. What did I prefer in the bedroom? An alien or two. How would I rate my sex drive on a scale of one to ten? Depended on the partner and me. Most of the time, a solid nine.

The rest of the questions were on a more boring note. My favorite books and movies. What I liked to do in my spare time. Not much.

I put the phone aside again before I was done and walked outside to my balcony. Fresh air helped when I was feeling overwhelmed, as happened sometimes. Tonight was one of those nights. Maybe it was the app. Maybe the thought of purposefully seeking out a mate instead of randomly dating.

The cool air of the night soothed me. The stars twinkled above as though each flicker was just for me. It was too bad I was way down here on Earth when my heart had always been in the skies.

Tipping my head back, I picked out the constellations. I’d studied them when I was little until my whole family was sick of me talking about it and I shut it down for the moment.

My position at the observatory was where it all paid off. I gave presentations to ticketholders, and while they got a 3D view of the galaxy, in no way was my job work. Looking to the heavens all day felt like a dream job.

After going back inside, I finished the questionnaire on the app and completed my profile with a simple selfie of me. No makeup. Hair not curled. In my pajamas. If a man couldn’t like me like this, then I wasn’t the one for them.

That night, I went to sleep with the galaxy projector on and my mind on an alien mate coming to rescue me and taking me to the stars.

A dream might be the only thing I ever had.

Chapter Four

Farsel

As if talking about it made it happen, I woke up very early the next morning with a dull ache in my stomach. It might be the late-night sandwich settling badly, but I had a bad feeling. One that was confirmed by noon when the ache spread from my core to my limbs. It was the mating burn, something only a small percentage of our people experienced but which many in my family did. A little fact I’d managed to conceal from those who approved my travel only because all of us held that secret close. I’d never have been allowed the trip. And since Tylan and I were bonded and sworn to share a mate, it would have cost him as well.

He’d spent a good part of the previous day looking at various dating apps but had not found any he thought would be good for us. But now I was extra motivated to find something to work. If I didn’t find our mate, the illness would take me, and that would leave Tylan all alone and far from home.

In the predawn darkness, I turned on the light over the kitchen table and sat down with my phone to see if I would have better luck than my friend. This time of day had always been a time of clarity for me, here, at home, and on the other planets we’d been permitted to study. Tylan’s aptitude with the internet here surpassed mine, in most cases, partly because it was one of his areas of study here, but I hoped that my mind’s differences from his would make it possible to do what he had not.

Search terms. Female. Mating. Marriage. Dating. What I would expect to find someone in search of a “love connection,” as I’d heard it called. A row of apps came up, and I spent some time looking them over, but what they offered either represented a segment of society—a particular religion of lifestyle—or appeared to be geared toward those interested in a physical hookup to ease their sexual needs or desires.

I was neither a farmer, a member of any registered theology group, nor any of the other specifics these humans seemed to sort into mating preferences. No wonder my friend had such a hard time. As I viewed and rejected app after app, I began to lose hope and wonder if I needed to look in another direction. My time was limited—an uncle had died less than two weeks after the onset of symptoms, and my grandfather had come close.

But then, just as I was ready to give up on online assistance, an ad for one more app came up on my screen. Mail-Order Matings. With nothing to lose and maybe something to gain, I clicked on the image and read the rest of the information. Like the others, this one was geared toward a particular group, but in all other ways, it was so different.

Instead of dating and marriage and similar terms, they used mating. The app was focused on helping shifters and others who were outside the norm find their fated ones. And because some of these true mates were humans, they allowed them to sign up, too. This app reminded me that not all inhabitants of this planet were standard humans. Despite the fact that many were and that although the greatest number chose to close their eyes to the others, they existed. How much better was I, having not taken those beings into consideration?

We had encountered many of them in our travels over the continents layering this world, yet when it was time to try to mate here, I forgot about them entirely? Our planet had far fewer types of sentient beings, but even we had some. How limited had my thinking become?

From what I was learning, there were many on Earth who were better suited for someone seeking a lifelong mating, and this app held the key to finding them.

I downloaded the app and began the process of filling out their questionnaire. Impressed with its extensiveness, I did my best to give accurate answers to as many of the queries as possible. Neither my friend nor I had any strong preferences in terms of hair and eye color, etc, but we did want someone seeking an equal partnership, and children would be desirable. Characteristics…kindness, a sense of humor, openness to new ideas. Where they asked about type of creature, I marked “other.” Our presence on this planet was not something I could put out there to the general public. Not even shifters and orcs. Our mate would have to know, eventually. But privately.

Once I had completed the form, or most of it, I was able to access the app itself, and several potential mates appeared in my inbox. That fast and easy?

It couldn’t be.

But it was, and reading each bio showed me why they were presented. Each was open to more than one mate, which was important to me, and they were all in an age range near ours. One tawny-haired female was a wolf shifter, another, adorned with silky black curls, claimed a witch/crow heritage going back five hundred years. Either might be all right. But the third?

Her name was Amaris, and she proudly stated she was a human with no magical legacy, but she admired the fact that shifters concept of mating appealed to her so much more than the idea of a marriage that would be easily dissolved when one or both parties found fault in the other.

I suspected many humans gave marriage a lot more of themselves than she was seeing, but she would base her ideas on her own observations. And the amount of thought she’d put into the whole thing made me even more interested in her.

It didn’t hurt that she had dark eyes with long lashes and silvery waves of hair, a cheek whose curve I wanted to caress, and a small smile lifting the corners of her rosy lips.

She was open to shifters but would consider others…and for a job? She worked at an observatory. Narrating the stars passage on its curved ceiling.

Would she like to hear about how the stars looked from our planet?

I sent a message.

---