Page 16 of Beauty and the Alien Beast: Naxer

I smelled the pit flowers before I saw them—a heavy, syrupy, green smell, somewhere between peppermint gum and apricot syrup. As we got closer, I caught a whiff of the decay underneath. Then we stepped out into a small, round clearing, and I saw them.

The pit flowers were a series of nearly flat circular patches on the ground, some palm-sized, one or two nearly the size of a truck. They expanded from a center pit that had to be twenty feet across, if not more, that looked like it had once been the parent plant for all the smaller offshoots. Now it was dead, its edges dry and leathery, its cavernous pit filled with clear rainwater.

Naxer took up a chunk of bark from the ground and threw it at one of the leathery circles. It snapped open at once, its center collapsing inward, and I heard a liquid plop.Like giant pitcher plants,I thought.

“Be careful where you step and where you set your things,” my guide warned me needlessly.

There was a rim of empty earth a few feet wide around the dead mother plant. I set my feet between the others, picking my way across to that safe rim. I had to sit down to remove the remains of my shoes and the bandages beneath. The latter took the longest: they stuck to me, forcing me to grit my teeth and pull them away, taking some scab and dried blood with them. When I slipped my feet into the lukewarm water, it stung a little, but the dried blood sloughed off my skin in a brownish cloud. My feet underneath were bruised and swollen but didn’t look infected.Thank God.

Once that was done though, the rest went quickly. I pulled my ragged, stinking clothes off and slipped into the water at once, trying not to think about Naxer’s eyes on me. Not that I found him staring creepy but because even the thought of his attention got me way hotter than I wanted to let on. Especially since he was minding his manners and didn’t comment or try to touch me.

“I need something else to dress in,” I muttered as I dropped the rags beside the busted shoes and bandages. “It probably smells worse than it looks.”

“I have an over-tunic you may use. Though you will probably get a little lost in it.” He sounded amused. I wondered if he was still trying to catch a peek at me, but if so, he was subtle about it.

He didn’t come near the water until I was safely submerged. Then he crossed the minefield of plants as well and crouched to unfasten his boots before stepping out of them. He stripped down with a calm efficiency that reminded me of soldiers headed for the shower: no time for modesty.

I tried my best not to stare, but it wasn’t easy.

When he unstrapped the gray suede jumpsuit and started pulling it off his body, he revealed an acre of smooth, almost hairless skin rippling with muscles. They bunched and shifted as he moved, his skin gleaming slightly with a light mist of sweat in the heat of the day. The faintest pewter treasure trail ran down his lower belly, spreading into a thick fuzz that covered his groin at the base of his cock.

Curious, I boldly eyed his cock. No spines, no bony cap. Just ringlike ridges that looked almost slick, and a hefty size to his cock that was a little intimidating all on its own.Holy shit. This alien is packing some serious heat.And from what I could tell, he was at half-mast just from his glimpse of me. His cock stood out from his belly just enough for me to see that I would have needed two hands just to cover it.

The relief I felt as I noticed the lack of penile spines or anything else scary-looking caught me by as much surprise as his size. Yes, I had some kind of animal attraction to my big blue savior, but that it was intense enough for me to be checking his genitals for compatibility was goddamn ridiculous.

It made me wonder where the rumor about the slavers’ dicks had come from. Were Omers like that under their clothes while the Gladiators weren’t? Had one slaver been so violent with one of us, it had started the rumor while I had still been unconscious and recovering from my implant surgery? Or had the rumor started itself, a product of our fear and the rapey talk the guards were always chuckling over?

No way of knowing. But as Naxer’s heavy form slid into the water, distracting me from my ugly thoughts, I caught myself hoping that my third theory was right.

I also hoped he hadn’t noticed me covertly inspecting his dick like some kind of thirsty-ass Earthling pervert. That would be a hell of a thing to explain.

This is what you get for running into a weirdly hot alien three years into a dry spell,I chided myself. The dry spell hadn’t been my idea. I blamed caving in to what my friends had all been doing and getting on the damn dating apps.

As I got used to the water, my mind slipped back four years to my last breakup. Mike. Fuckboy supreme: three of his girlfriends had found out about each other at once. There had turned out to be seven of us. Thanks to that chucklehead’s condom-removing shenanigans, the four had also walked away with a nasty infection. I’d dodged that bullet, but not the humiliation, the questioning of my own taste in men.

I’d gone on the dating apps, and despite being on the downside of thirty, I’d gotten a mountain of replies. Some had been relatively normal, just incompatible. Most had been zero-effort. Some had been bizarre attempts at manipulation, like “I know you’re not even going to reply to this.” Then came the real morons, blathering on about sex, expecting a look at my boobs before so much as buying me a drink.

And of course there had been dicks. Every shade, shape, and size of penis from every angle, from sizable hairy messes hanging out of stained underwear to a weirdly featureless stalk the size of a thumb. I’d blocked and reported a dozen disembodied dongs in the first hour after setting up my account. But none of them had looked like they came out of a sex toy shop, not like Naxer’s big blue friend.

If Naxer had noticed me eyeing him up, he didn’t bring it up. Instead, he focused on scrubbing off, and I struggled to do the same. My joints ached; my whole body felt bruised. Fortunately, aside from my feet and a few burns from the pain sticks, I had little in the way of actual injuries.

The water clouded, then cleared again, surprising me. I swept my hand through it, sensing a slightly soapy feel to it, like fresh dishwater. “Do you guys often use the dead plants for bathing?”

“Yes, depending on a mix of availability and necessity. The water gathers here during the rains, and residue from the dead plants makes it good at cleaning things. In this way, something that was a danger to avoid becomes useful.”

I looked out over the field of dangerous plants around us, their trapdoors flat and innocent-looking, waiting. “I’m guessing animals won’t go near the smell.”

“Some will, but they blunder into a trap well before they can become a threat.” He stretched his arms around the leathery rim of the flower, his fingertips almost touching my shoulder. I knew I should move away, but I didn’t.

I had trouble taking my eyes off him too, or keeping my eyes on his face. It embarrassed me. He was an alien, in a goddamn alien world, so far from where I wanted to be that I did not know how I would even get back. It wasn’t like I could jack a spaceship and fly back. I would have to get help from the locals somehow, and this alien was all I had at the moment.

If I didn’t have to leave him behind because he wouldn’t cooperate anyway. Which was another reason not to let myself stareor, God forbid, flirt. He thought I was his soul mate. I could have used that to my advantage, but women who did shit like that lost my respect really quickly. I sure as hell didn’t want to be one of them.

CHAPTER10

NAXER

I had never been happier not to be a young pup with raging blood to go with my restless Wulfaen.

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