Page 21 of My Big Alien Bodyguard

Like that, he’s gone. I turn my attention back to the television, still reporting on the Lyric Walker concert.

“You're mad at me, aren’t you?”

She hasn’t spoken since we got her on the ship. She cried and she shook and she was sick when medic Sukar set her leg, but she hasn’t put a sentence together. I thought she was asleep.

I look down at her now. She is pale, pathetic, and probably sorry. She does not look like a rock star. She looks like an exhausted woman who should know better. It’s as if whatever charisma and energy that made her seem untouchable on stage has deserted her completely.

“Yes,” I say. I will not lie. I will not pretend that what she did was in any way okay, or an accident, or understandable. What she did was absolutely unconscionable.

“I knew it.”

“I knew you were reckless. But I thought you at least had some empathy for your fans. You put so many people in danger tonight. You got people hurt. All because you seem to have some kind of death wish.”

“It’s not a death wish,” she says, her voice small. “I want to feel them. They’re always too far away, and no matter how much they call for me, or come for me, I… I can’t ever connect with them. Not really. I’m like the fox that could never eat the grapes.”

“If you want connection, you have that intimately with another person. You don’t get it from masses of people all at once. A crowd can never give you what you’re looking for.”

“Neither can other people,” she mutters, more to herself than to me.

We are stuck in this contract, this relationship of obligation. We are playing our roles, and I have to admit that we are both playing them to the hilt. She is so concerned with rebelling against the limits set on her she doesn’t think. And I am so concerned with controlling her, I don’t think either. We’re puppets, and we’re playing roles we agreed to play when we signed our lives away. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

“Lyric,” I say. “I care about you very much.”

She looks at me. “But you’re angry at me.”

“Yes, I am. I’m angry because I care. Because it matters to me what happens to you. I watched you fall.”

“I know,” she sighs. “It was stupid. But the whole point of being a singer is to reach people. It’s not just to sing at them and makemoney. It’s to mean something to them, and to make them feel like they matter too.”

“Noble goals not achieved by collapsing a stage and breaking your leg.”

“Yeah. I know I fucked up. You don’t have to keep telling me. I get it. I’m a product. And I’m…”

“Lyric,” I say sternly. “Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself.”

“My leg hurts,” she whimpers.

“I bet it does.”

I want to comfort her, but I can’t touch her without risking moving her, not more than reaching out and patting her head, which I do, but which does not feel much like comfort at all.

“Sources say bad girl starlet Lyric Walker has been remanded into the care of a physician after breaking a leg at the much awaited and several times delayed concert. Is Lyric Walker the most controversial starlet of all time?”

“Can you turn that off?” she sighs.

I suppose I can. It’s not as though I do not know what is going on with her. She is directly in front of me, after all.

“Prepare for docking,” the captain announces over the intercom. “We have arrived at Metropolis. Medical transport is standing by to conduct the passenger.”

“Alright. Here we go.”

“I’m scared.” She grabs my hand with hers, and her fingers are just so small and her voice is shaking. I cannot stay angry at her.It’s not mentally or physically possible to do so. I am a protector, and she is my ward.

“You are safe,” I tell her. “No harm will come to you. I will be by your side throughout, as I have been since we first met.”

I intend my words to be comforting, but they make her immediately burst into tears.

“You’re so nice to me,” she wails. “And I don’t deserve it, not even a little bit. I make your job so hard, and I get hurt just trying to fuck with you.”

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