Page 29 of Swept By The Alien Pirate Prince

The water was murky, covered in a film of algae in places, and brown. The air was balmy, misty. The humidity made my hair poof out and feel heavy on my head, sticking to the back of my neck from a thin film of sweat on my skin.

The only thing that kept the bugs away was the almost constant breeze. The wind was a reminder that I wasn’t on Earth, and it stirred a stiff warning that a storm could break out at any given moment — unleashing a fury of hell in its wrath.

I woke in a bed that looked like it had been carved by hand from the trees in the wood surrounding us in the back.

The mattress was made from sewn linen and stuffed with straw.

There wasn’t a fitted bedsheet, but we’d been given a white blanket to sleep with, and pillows made and stuffed with the same straw material.

I sat up straight in the bed. My legs were tangled in the sheets. Cyburn’s side was empty. My pulse quickened.

“Cyburn?” I called out to him. My voice sounded rusty and unused.

I heard nothing in response.

I untwisted my legs from the sheets and swung them over the side of the bed. I stood up straight and padded to the open square of the cabin leading out to the deck.

The breeze helped to taper some of the swampy air.

“Cyburn?” I asked again to the vast emptiness around me, only this time my voice echoed with less confidence and an increased unease. Something about this ocean made me feel isolated and lonely.

I swallowed hard and glanced over my shoulder. Perhaps Cyburn was in the bathroom —

No.

He wasn’t there.

I answered that question to myself before I’d even finished the thought. The door to the bathroom was open, and the light was out.

I walked to the front of the cabin and stepped out onto the deck that formed into a wooden walkway leading to the beach.

I found Cyburn, sitting under a tiki hut, the roof made from palm fronds, the posts made from carved wood that had been planted in the sand.

There was a bonfire adjacent to Cyburn, even though it was day — morning — or so I assumed. I’d lost sense of time.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes as I began trekking over the wooden planks in my bare feet, wearing nothing but a white nightgown to see what was going on, on the other side where Cyburn sat with a blank stare on his face.

There were a few crew members mingling near Cyburn, but he wasn’t interacting with them.

A few of the locals were around, dressed in clothing that resembled tribal gear back on Earth. They were decorated with intricate necklaces, headpieces, ankle, and wrist bracelets much like the jewelry Cyburn often wore.

They wore black bodysuits and no shoes. Their skin was green, but it was more of a faded green color, almost as if pigmentation had been an afterthought in their DNA structure.

Their noses were more pronounced, not as flattened as that of Cyburn or the other Alesians I’d come to know on the ship.

There was a woman standing behind the tiki hut placing what looked like pink and white fish on a platter.

My bare feet switched from wood to sand. The sand was damp and cold, and sunk in between my toes.

Cyburn was sitting with one leg stretched out in front of him, and the other was raised up to his chest. His arm dangled over his knee.

His right hand clutched a glass with the same Alesian, amber colored bourbon in it that he had been drinking with excessiveness ever since the Amada fiasco went down.

“Good morning,” I said and slowed my pace as I approached my brooding lover.

As soon as Cyburn saw me, he hurried to his feet and took a step backward. He glanced from me to the glass in his hand, his features etched with guilt as if he was a child who had just been caught stealing or eating chocolate after bedtime.

“Good morning.” Cyburn cleared his throat, sturdied his footing, and nodded in my direction as if we were nothing more than colleagues rather than involved in an intimate relationship.

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