Page 43 of Crash Landing
“You valerians are very clean, you know,” she said, oblivious to the monster she’d awoken. “I’m a scientist now. I was curious how you’d react to being dirty.”
“You study plants, Sam,” I said flatly.
She shrugged a shoulder, dismissing that remark, and raised her brows at me, waiting. I gave her a long, piercing look, silently giving her a chance to retreat, but she didn’t. She just stood there observing. It wasn’t until I lunged that she let out a shrill scream and turned to flee. But it was much too late for that. I hoisted her up by her waist and carried her kicking and screaming toward the water’s edge. Amid her screams, gentle laughter was like the sweetest music to my ears. The woman was toying with me and I loved it. I loved it too much.
We reached the water and Sam somehow twisted around in my grip like a squirming fish. The moment I threw her into the river, she’d managed to hook her arms around my neck and I went flying in after her. Both of us went under and when I emerged, she was thrashing and wiping mud and water from her eyes. But the look of joyous victory on her face was worth the struggle.
The water wasn’t deep. Standing, it reached a bit higher than my hips. For Sam, it was deeper, but she stood just fine.
“I’m starting to think I’m going to be wet until someone rescues us off this rock,” she commented.
“It’s very likely,” I said, sliding my shirt off my shoulders. Partly because I didn’t like the feeling of being hugged by wet fabric, but also because I knew by the way Sam’s heart beat that it drove her crazy.
It was my own cocky attitude that wanted to drive her crazy. I could tell by her silence that it had worked and when I turned to look at her and saw her forcing her eyes elsewhere, I couldn’t help but smirk.
Except I was distracted by how her clothes cinched tightly to her body. And beneath her shirt there was nothing. Her nipples peaked under the thin fabric and instantly I felt my cock swell beneath the water. When Sam looked up at me, I quickly locked eyes with her and she forced a nervous smile, crossing her arms over her breasts.
“We should rinse the potatoes, yeah?” she said, wading toward the shore.
I watched her climb out of the water toward the roots we’d gathered. She took a couple in her hands and brought them to the river. I was doing everything I could in the meantime to will my cock into submission before I got out of the water. When Sam brought another few potatoes and rinsed them, she seemed suspicious.
“You coming out?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, strategically waiting for her to pick up the cleaned roots and turn around.
Quickly, I stood from the water and gathered the remaining bounty in my soaked shirt, imagining the most vile things I could think of as I trailed behind her. Maje stew. Hairless corpselts. War wounds. Dirty flight panels. By the time we reached our building, my cock had wilted beneath the unpleasant images I drew up in my head and I walked inside.
Sam was already cutting into one of the small roots with the tiniest knife I’d ever seen. The look of awe on her face when sparse amounts of purple juice wept out of the rough, black skin was priceless. She cut a small triangle of the root’s meat out of it and held it up to look at the deep, purple-blue hues.
“I’ve never seen a more gorgeous moon potato,” she said.
“You’ve never seen a moon potato.”
“So, how do we eat them?”
“Usually steamed, but nothing here will light on fire for us to boil water.”
“Can they be eaten raw?”
“Yes. They’re not nearly as tasty though.”
Before I knew it, Sam was biting into one of the potatoes, chewing it quizzically. I watched her brows bob and furrow as she judged the flavor and then she smiled.
“They’re more like moon apples,” she said. “Bland, fibrous moon apples. Do you know what this means?” She attempted to cut into her bitten root with her tiny, dull blade and I moved to intervene, pulling my hilt from the thigh holster on the table. “This means I made a discovery and I field-tested it. Well, you showed me a discovery and now I can record my findings. That is if I don’t die in my sleep because these things somehow cause a fatal reaction, which would be my luck.”
I ejected the buzzing, blue blade from its hilt and made quick work of slicing up the root. Then I cut the next one so there were enough slices to feed us both for the day.
“I wonder how many calories are in these. You know, steamed and served with steak, these would be like beats, but without the dirt flavor.”
She took a slice and crunched into it, going over all her ideas in her head. I enjoyed watching her think and analyze. A year prior, she was too anxious to do anything like that. She was too anxious to be curious, but clearly curiosity was a large part of her.
Taking a slice of the root, I bit into it and skimmed over my projects to distract me from Sam’s unusual appeal. Stars above, it was killing me. The sooner I got off that rock, the faster I could get my head on straight and resolve my surge problem.
I hated referring to it as a problem, but it was sending my brain all kinds of signals I didn’t know how to deal with. Not with someone who likely didn’t feel the same. Someone from a different world.
“I’m going to record some of my observations while they’re fresh,” Sam said, taking a few more slices of the root and heading for her room.
18: Sam
