Page 33 of Crash Landing
“Talking to yourself?” his voice said. I whipped myself around to see him leaning in the doorway. He was wearing the pants portion of his suit, but his top was bare and still glistening with water. “Kind of early for that, isn’t it? I thought it took at least a couple weeks for a human to go mad in their solitude.”
“I’m not going mad,” I defended. “People can talk to themselves and not be crazy. It’s called thinking out loud.”
Saleuk moved further into the room, the damp towel draped over one shoulder. In his hand was the small pile of fruit I’d seen outside. His long hair was still loose and sticking to his wet back and shoulders as he hoisted his pack onto a table near the back wall and dropped the fruit inside. He held onto one, though, and when he was finished, he slung the pack onto his back and moved toward me. He stopped barely a step away and held up the little morsel.
“Eat,” he said. “You’re still weak.”
Slowly, I raised my hand and gripped the fruit between my fingers. Our hands brushed as I did and for some reason, that soft little meeting of skin zapped through me like a tiny bolt of electricity that headed straight for… places. My muscles tensed and I pulled the fruit away, clearing my throat as I slipped it into my mouth. Chewing, I gradually lifted my gaze to meet his, suddenly feeling shy.
“Thanks,” I said, swallowing the mouthful of sweet kalaha.
He lingered there a moment, his gaze fastened to mine until my tongue swept across my lips. Then his eyes were on my mouth and another jolt of heat rushed south.
Curses were blaring in my head and I wondered if Saleuk could hear how hard my heart was beating. Valerians could sense things like that. Or so I heard.
“You seemed a little nervous out there,” he brought up. “Seeing me naked.”
“Not nervous. I’ve seen plenty of naked men. I’m very experienced with that. I mean… you’re just different.”
His mouth quirked like that was some kind of compliment.
“There are other buildings here,” he said. “You chose the worst one.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I should have shopped around more while I was dragging your two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body across an entire forest at night.”
He laughed and I wanted to punch him in the face for about two seconds before my eyes settled on his smile. His incredibly handsome, alien smile.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I huffed, turning to face away from him.
He just laughed again and walked past me, swiping my pack on his way out. I had no choice but to follow him further into the ruins. When we turned the corner around a wall that had been completely reshaped by vines and roots, I saw another building, mostly intact, across a small courtyard. We walked in through a partly open sliding door and inside what looked like a lobby of some kind I saw a round, fountain-like structure with a giant tree growing through the middle. The tree had broken a big hole in the roof and moss, vines, and fungus plates all took up the space like the building was just a minor inconvenience to nature.
On the left side of the lobby was a table on which a bunch of old electrical equipment and parts were already spread out and organized like Saleuk had already combed the place for supplies. I followed him through the lobby to a metal ramp that wound like a giant spiral staircase and led to a second floor.
“There’s a room here,” he pointed toward a narrow doorway. “And a room here.” He pointed at another. “There are several more, but these were the most intact.”
“How long do you think we’ll be here?”
“I told them to come get us as soon as they got all the humans processed. It shouldn’t be long. They’re probably sending someone now. It wouldn’t hurt to have a working commlink, though.”
Relief washed through me as I peered into one of the rooms. It wasn’t much. It might have been at one point, but now it was a moderate space with no furniture, a bed with no sheets or mattress, and a giant, tinted mirror covering one whole side. There was a shower compartment, but I could see from the doorway that the pipes were eroded and cracked.
“Here,” Saleuk said, handing me my pack. “If you want to wash up, you’ll have to do it in the river. There’s no running water.”
“Yeah, I got that.” I took my pack and headed into the room, tossing it on the naked bed frame. “I’ve slept in worse places,” I said to myself.
“Have you?”
I spun to face him, a little surprised he heard me. “Well, yeah. Last night,” I lied.
Or when I was living on the streets sleeping behind the burger joint. Or when I nearly ODed in a park when temperatures were nearly freezing.
The room was a long way from plenty of shitty places I’d had to hole up in in the past. At least there were walls.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the mirrored wall.
“Was a digital screen. There’s no power in this place anymore, but when there was, these screens would display whatever the workers wanted. Most of them chose to look at Valer. We valerians are easily homesick. Or, at least we werebefore we were forced off multiple worlds. Now none of us really stay in one place.”
“Humans get homesick. But we’ve only got the one planet.”
