Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Chapter Ten

Gods, it was hot. Even with the suppressants keeping his body in check, the heat had a way of creeping in. The window was open, but there was no breeze and the air sat on Tagen’s chest, as hot and wet as if it had just come from the mouth of some invisible monster. Tagen could honestly say he would cut off a finger for just one bottle of iced ul. He even knew which one. Left hand, second.

He could not lie in this bed one second more. He rose naked and damp with sweat and cracked his door cautiously.

The house was still.

Tagen walked into the bathing room and stepped into the shower. The sound of the pipes working was abrasively loud, but all Tagen’s concerns for quiet ended the instant the false rain of the spray struck him. Tagen groaned as quietly as he was able, scrubbing sweat from his face and chest, massaging his tired muscles back to some semblance of life.

It was a blessed respite, but he could not shower forever. The heat was still out there, and the heat made him restless.

He left the shower with some reluctance, cloaking his naked loins with a wrapped towel in the unlikely event that he should encounter his human host. He went downstairs and navigated his way by feel to the kitchen.

The cold storage appliance released a breath of arctic air and Tagen savored it for a moment before bringing out a plate of the cold meat Daria had prepared. Chicken, she called it. It was pale and unappetizing, but the taste was agreeable and the meat was filling. He took the entire plate and a glass of iced water with him back down the hall, but not to his room.

Tagen sat on the sofa in the front room, letting his towel come unbound when he bent. He put his feet up on the low table and found the remote device in the dark.

He had left the tee-vee on the law officer program he favored, but it was not broadcasting now. Tagen ate chicken, watching several minutes of what he ultimately determined to be a very long commercial, and then began to switch channel feeds. Nothing he saw appealed to him.

The heat was relentless, smothering. He drank his water and fished out cubed ice to rub on his bare skin. He wanted to crawl inside his cup and die.

Tagen’s thumb, steadily pressing its way through the channels, suddenly paused. His expression, had he known it, never changed. His left hand continued to swirl the liquid in his glass just so that he could listen to the dull clink of ice. One talon takked thoughtfully on the surface of the low table.

On the screen before him, two humans were mating. Not merely pressing their mouths on one another or fumbling at clothing, as he had seen before in the course of the tee-vee’s programs, but mating. Right out in the open and broadcast for all the Earth to see.

It did not much resemble Jotan mating, unless, of course, the players had first partaken of some of vey Venekus’ mild sedative. It was slow, torturously slow, and the humans really didn’t seem to be enjoying it much. They hardly made any sound, and apart from a little light stroking of one another, were restrained enough nearly to be inanimate. And yet, it held a certain fascination for him.

Tagen’s eyes trailed slowly, almost gravely, across the female’s form. She was slender, like his Daria, and made with the same generous curves and valleys in all the same places, although this female’s breasts were larger and had not the organic bounce that Daria’s had when she moved. He wondered idly why that was so. Her pubic mound was nearly bare, but for an odd square patch of dark hair. A very, very square patch. Jotan grew no hair save on their heads. That unnatural black spot made for an obsessive focus for Tagen’s gaze. His eyes tracked slowly back and forth, up and down, back and forth.

No. Not much like regular mating, but Tagen began to feel distinctly aroused regardless and he found himself musing on the last time he’d had sex, just for comparison’s sake. He tipped his glass and drank, shutting his eyes to the scene before him but not changing the channel. He could still hear the sounds they made: her soft groans and sighs, his low grunts and mutters. It sounded like they were mating in their sleep. He felt a little sorry for them.

His last time, now…

He had been taking his ease in the recreations bay, his deep space tour nearly done (and his promotion to sek’ta, no doubt, already working its way towards full approval), drinking ul and watching two of his fellow officers throw chiak. He noticed the female when she entered the bay, of course, but like everyone else, he pretended not to. Not until she came and sat at his table.

“You’re Tagen Pahnee,” she’d said.

“Yes. And you’re not.” Wit had never been his greatest strength.

She’d smiled anyway. A generous soul. “We fought together at Rae-Rae,” she told him. “I haven’t seen much of you since then.”

And was she flirting with him? Yes, she was. Tagen had sipped at his ul, feigning interest in the chiak game, intensely aware of the female sitting beside him. “I’ve been busy,” he said.

“That’s a shame. Too busy, I wonder?”

“That would depend on what I was wanted for.” He risked a direct stare, and her smile broadened. She was flirting, by the gods, and she wasn’t a bit shy about it.

“Suppose someone were to ask you to catalogue the emissions readers in the load-pan bay.”

“Then I would be busy.” He returned his gaze to the game.

“And suppose someone were to do this.” She leaned forward unexpectedly and bit him on the jaw, right there, in front of half the crew.

“Well, then I might find a little time,” he’d replied, and, emboldened by the ul, nudged her chin up and bit her right back. He could taste her arousal, feel her pulse racing hotter in her veins.

She’d stood up without another word, her hand catching his, and led him back to her quarters.

That was mating, Tagen reflected, listening to the muffled groans and gasps on the tee-vee. Not this supine imitation, but the real thing. Thrashing, fighting, screaming, scratching, kicking, clawing, real sexplay. And every day after her shift was done, she’d come to fetch him and play it out again. She’d even come to see him the day his tour was up, just long enough to throw him a smile and flash a little fang. “When my number comes up, expect me to call on you,” was her parting word.

He looked forward to it, and not just for the private pride that came from knowing one had been selected to breed. She had been a fine, ferocious mate.

Tagen opened his eyes and stared meditatively at the ceiling. He listened, hearing only moans, whimpers, gasps.

The tee-vee could be deceptive, he knew. It was most often fiction, idealized for drama. Tagen had never seen humans mating in reality, but he had seen plenty of rescued breeders, and if the captives there were anything to judge by, this program that captivated his interest now was purest fiction.

But then, there was a great difference between a free human and a slave. Tagen found himself wondering what Daria might look like while she were mating.

Ah, damn this heat.

Tagen’s glass was empty. He took it and the platter of chicken bones into the kitchen and left them in the sink. They would distress Daria there, but then, they would distress her more in the front room. And as long as he was going to distress her anyway, he might as well put them in the place she’d be taking them to clean them anyway. She’d probably spend all day scrubbing those two, measly dishes.

And when she was done, she’d probably mop the floor. On her hands and knees. Her body rocking. Her breasts bobbing. Much like the female on the mating feed.

Oh, what in the hell was wrong with him?!

Nothing’s wrong, he told himself sourly. He was just hot and tired and restless, and the best cure for that was a sound thrash in the sheets. If he were home, he’d have only to take a walk down to Fleet Headquarters and look available. He was Tagen Pahnee, was he not? He would have a female before the hour was up.

Tagen returned to the sofa and the tee-vee. The humans had changed positions, and now the female was bent over the end of the bed, on her knees. The male was caressing her, preparing to enter. Tagen drummed his claws on the side of the sofa, waiting.

The female gasped when the male finally got around to penetrating. Just gasped. Gods. But he was riding earnestly enough, his hips slapping the female’s hocks, making them judder and ripple. Her breasts, Tagen noted, scarcely moved at all. He wondered if it were customary for humans to mate this way, like beasts. Jotan did not. Although their reproductive organs were in very near the same place, it was not quite near enough for a female to be comfortably mounted from behind. But the humans seemed to enjoy it. He wondered, would Daria—?

Why did his mind keep returning to her? How she mated was no concern of his. And the gods knew, she was not about to extend him an offer. Her eyes were on him always, and although she made an effort to converse with him and adjust to him, there was a fear in her, deeply-rooted. It was not the fear of rape, precisely. Tagen had had all too many occasions to see that look in the eyes of recovered slaves. It was the fear of all of him—his size, his power, his eyes, his voice, and yes, his maleness. At the same time, it was a fear that had nothing at all to do with him, one that almost certainly existed before he had ever come into her home and would continue to exist long after he left.

And what of her in his mind? Why not explore that, since she was sleeping soundly in her chamber and he was here watching humans mate. Did he think her attractive?

He didn’t know, having never thought of humans to that purpose. Humans and Jotan were alike in so many ways, and yet, this Daria Cleavon was very different from what he considered an ideal female form. All the same, for all her feminine similarities, he could not quite imagine that body beneath his. She was so small, so slender, so rounded in so many strangely arousing places.

Her face he found fair. Delicate as spun glass, and yes, beautiful in an eerie, human way. The white markings that made half a mask of it threatened every time he saw it to erase the line between the exotic and the erotic. Her eyes, green and blue, floating in a sea of white, were so clear and guileless, open windows to the very heart of her. Her lips, full and pink and gently bowed, were an easy thing to watch as he tried to puzzle out her words.

Humans used their lips on one another when they wooed. They called it a kiss. He had seen it among the recovered slaves he’d known, and he saw it with even more ardor on the tee-vee. It was what they seemed to do instead of biting, but then, a human’s thin skin could never survive the love-bites of a passionate Jotan, a fact made obvious in the flesh of many of those recovered from raided sex-houses.

Tagen raised a hand absentmindedly and touched his own lips. He watched the humans in the tee-vee perform their endless human kiss and wondered how Daria’s mouth would taste. Kissing was an alien and unknowable thing. What did they do with their teeth when they did it? Or their tongues? Where did noses go? It wasn’t just other’s mouths they sought, either, and that raised the question of what was acceptable and what was not. One could kiss a breast, he saw, or a belly or a throat, but what of a knee? An elbow? The hocks, the ears, the toes?

The humans were now suddenly clothed and talking as they navigated a groundcar. Tagen leaned back into the sofa and folded his arms heavily across his chest, concentrating on their words, determined to make this foray into deviancy as educational as possible. His vocabulary was improving, but not rapidly enough. He knew if he could just talk to Daria, she would be a help to him. She was quick, as quick a mind as any officer of the Fleet. Quicker than most of his colleagues aboard his last tour, in fact. Military minds tended toward efficiency rather than intuition and deduction, which was probably why there were so many like E’Var loose in the universe. Predators such as him never lacked for insight.

“Are you an alien?” Daria had asked him, very nearly her first lucid thought. Not, are you a ghost, are you a demon, are you a hallucination, or are you anything at all supernatural. No, she had made that first leap blindly and made it correctly, despite the fact that Earth’s idea of an alien being was nothing like a Jotan. And despite all the awful fear of him that had been clawing free of her, she had never lost her hold on logic. “Where would I go? Who could I possibly tell about you?” It took a formidable mind to remember such things in the grip of terror.

And it was terror, a truer and rawer form than he had ever seen in the eyes of slaves. It was not merely that she had never known a Jotan. Something was wrong with her, something rooted down deep in her soul and bleeding out slow poison. Something had happened to her that was every bit as bad as being removed from her Earth and enslaved. He didn’t know what and she wasn’t about to tell him, but the truth of it was there and she lived with him despite it. One could not help but admire that.

The male on the tee-vee had abandoned his female and stumbled across two others. They were only talking now, but in that sly-eyed, smoldering way that Tagen strongly suspected would lead to mating very soon. And sure enough, one of the females was undressing. He had been watching this program for half an hour now, and he still had no idea what it was supposed to be about.

‘And now I want to fuck,’ Tagen thought with an inward growl. He switched off the tee-vee and stood up, gathering his damp towel to head upstairs. He was naked and he did not much care. One never knew. Daria might emerge from her room unexpectedly and be overcome with arousal at the sight of him. Or curiosity. Hell, he’d settle for her being overwhelmed with boredom. Humans didn’t seem to need any more reason to mate than Jotan did, and Tagen knew he was a fair-looking male. Probably even by human standards, if the males he saw on the mating programs represented the highest criteria.

She did not emerge.

Tagen waited outside her door in the dark for several minutes, unreasonably irritated with her. Any other time of the day or night, if he’d been unclad and trying to hide it, she’d have found a way to stumble across him and then run screaming from the room to clean her cupboards. Naturally, now that he was of half a mind to be discovered, she was soundly sleeping.

For the best, really. Even by Jotan standards, lurking naked outside a female’s bedroom was a little too aggressive to be properly thought of as flirting. He’d thrown that sly-eyed human male out of this house for far less. Gods, he was turning into a hypocrite as well as a liar. He needed to go to bed. Perhaps it would be cooler in the morning.

Tagen opened Daria’s bedroom door.

In the dark, he could just make out the greenish blobs of the cat’s eyes catching light. It unwrapped itself from the bed and came toward him, miawing. Tagen bent and rubbed its head to shut it up, and it moved past him and out the door, no doubt to visit its food dish and see if a dinner had magically appeared since last it looked. Tagen closed the door behind it, his gaze resting on the bed where Daria lay.

If she opened her eyes right now and saw him standing naked in her doorway, she would burst his eardrums screaming and she’d be right to do so. If this were Jota and she a proper female, she could have him convicted of intended rape on this alone and he would spend the next twenty years imprisoned for it.

This wasn’t Jota. Tagen took a step forward.

‘Stop,’ he told himself suddenly, and his inner voice was neither shocked nor angry, only firm. He stopped, listening to Daria’s even, heavy breaths. His mind’s voice spoke again, calmly, ‘What do you really mean to do when you reach her? Honestly. What?’

There was no answer. There could not be. There was nothing he could do in honor to an insensate female and there was no chance she’d wake receptive to him.

Tagen turned around and slipped back out and down the hall to his own room. He hung the towel out the window to dry and sat on the edge of his lumpy bed. Daria. He had been close enough to taste her sweat in the air.

Dammit.

Tagen fell onto his back, splayed to the night. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

Gods, it was hot.

*

It was past seven when the morning light managed to pry Daria out of sleep. She was drowsily surprised by this. Grendel had a hard time going this long without breakfast, and she hadn’t heard a peep out of him. She groped for him in his usual spot by her hip and didn’t find him.

Bewildered, she sat up and really looked for him. He wasn’t in the bed. He wasn’t over pawing at the door. He wasn’t here.

He had come to bed with her last night, hadn’t he? Sometimes he preferred the sofa downstairs, and since the alien had come along, Grendel had shunned her once or twice to hang out with him, but no, she was positive he’d followed her to bed.

Daria got up, gathered some clean clothes, and took herself a quick shower. When she went downstairs, Tagen was there on the sofa with Grendel on his lap. The orange tabby opened his eyes a slit when Daria came to hover at the edge of the living room, but that was all. Tagen’s hand was rubbing tiny circles slowly down from his neck to the base of his tail, and the cat was too overcome with pleasure even to purr anymore.

Tagen was looking at her, too, and with considerably more intensity than the cat.

“Were you in my room last night?” Daria blurted. She’d meant to ask if he’d had breakfast. Oh well.

“Yes,” said Tagen, after a short hesitation. He didn’t look horribly ashamed of himself, either.

“Why?” she asked.

His gaze went back to the television.

“That’s not an answer,” she said warningly.

He glanced her way and then turned his eyes on Grendel. He scratched lightly at the cat’s ears and Grendel’s head drooped until his nose bumped Tagen’s knee. “I wanted to look at you,” he said.

She scowled at him. “Well, don’t do it again. I’m not going to run away and you don’t need to keep double-checking. If I want you in my room, I’ll leave the door open. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.”

“Hm.” He returned his attention to the television screen.

She leaned in just enough to see the picture and groaned as she saw the familiar herky-jerky camera moves and cop scenes of Law & Order. “It’s seven in the morning! Why are they playing this crap already?”

Tagen frowned slightly. He lifted one bare foot and set it down casually on the coffee table, curling his talons possessively around the remote control.

“And you,” she said. “Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me you really need to watch it all damn day? As a language lesson?”

“Yes.”

She snorted.

His frown deepened and he turned his golden gaze back on her. “I think,” he said slowly, “you do not realize how difficult English is to learn.” He pronounced it strangely, the N-sound merely a glottal before the second syllable: n-Glish. “So many words have the same meaning. So many words sound the same, or nearly so, and yet mean very different things.” He took a claw from Grendel’s massage and raised it, a badly-cast professor emphasizing the day’s lesson. “Diff-icult,” he said. “Diff-erent. Mean, a definition. Mean, to be unkind.” There was a particular stress on that last word and his eyes sharpened. Then he turned back to the television and continued stroking down Grendel’s back.

“I see your point,” Daria said. She folded her arms across her chest, still a little stung by his stress of the word ‘unkind’. “What I don’t understand is why you watch Law & Order all the time instead of, for example, Sesame Street or some other show that’s actually designed to help people learn.”

Tagen’s jaw ticced. “I like this show.”

“I could get you a Spanish to English dictionary,” she offered.

His brow furrowed and he glanced at her. “Spanish?”

“That other language you speak. Er, hola.”

His face smoothed out with comprehension. “Panyol,” he said. “What is a dictionary?”

“A book of words. Rather,” she amended (his expression told her plainly that all books had words), “A book with Spanish…Panyol words and then how to say them in English.”

“Useful,” Tagen grunted. His gaze crept back to the screen. “But I cannot read Panyol. I can only speak it. So I will watch your shows. It helps me to understand proper usage. I may as well enjoy a show I watch for such a purpose.”

“Yeah, but you’re always telling me I talk too fast.” She waved at the TV. “Are you telling me they slow down and repeat themselves when you ask them to?”

“No.” He kept his eyes on the screen. “Neither do you.”

Ouch. “Have you eaten?” Daria asked after a moment.

“Last night.”

Presumably after he’d stuck his nose in her room. She steeled herself for dirty dishes in the kitchen. “Do you want something now?”

“Please.”

Daria turned and started down the hall, then paused and looked back, meaning to ask if he had a preference. The question stuttered apart unspoken. Tagen brought his eyes up inquiringly to hers, but up was definitely the operative word.

More than anything else right then, more even than the persistent anxiety of having an alien in the house at all, Daria was confused. Had he just been checking her out? It wasn’t the sort of thing she could just ask. She turned around again, somewhat stiltedly, and made herself go to the kitchen.

There was an empty glass and a plate of chicken bones in the sink. All the chicken bones, by the look of it. The man got up for a midnight snack and ate eight pieces of chicken. She shook the bones out into the garbage and made a sour mental note to scratch cold chicken salad off the menu that night. Regular pasta salad would have to do.

She was scrubbing the dishes clean in the sink when Grendel padded across the tiles and peered accusingly into his food bowl. He yowled irritably when he saw it was still empty, and Daria let the soapy dishes go in the washwater and went to fetch him some chow. Somehow the cat food had gotten put back on the top shelf, and she had to really work to reach it down. She just got her hands to close on a tin when a dark movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention. She glanced around and there was Tagen. She wasn’t as sure about the direction of his gaze this time, but it definitely took a split-second before it was on her face.

She frowned at him and pulled Grendel’s breakfast open. “What?”

He looked marginally surprised by her cautious tone. “May I not be here while you prepare food?”

“Well…sure. Just…sit down or something.” She bent down to get Grendel’s food dish and this time, she shot a glance behind her and sure enough, he was looking right at her ass.

‘Okay, slow down,’ she told herself, as that first flare of unreasonable alarm spiked up through her. ‘You keep forgetting the dude’s not human. It’s only natural to look at an alien’s ass.’

She hadn’t been looking at his.

‘No, but you were sure staring at his face plenty yesterday. And his hands, and his feet. So chill. He’s probably never seen an ass like yours before.’

That had a bizarre humor to it that not even Daria could shrug off entirely. Her ass, the wonder of the universe. She emptied Grendel’s breakfast into his bowl and bent back over to place it before her mewling animal. This time, she really bent. Straight legs, all the way over, ass out, everything. She peeked at Tagen in the reflective face of the dishwasher and saw him lean back slightly.

When she straightened up and turned around, he was perfectly poker-faced. He walked over to the kitchen table and sat, folding his clawed hands patiently before him. After a second or two, he tried on a smile.

It unnerved her. She returned to washing the dishes. “What do you feel like eating?” she asked.

“I am not in a position to be selective,” he replied, which was a refreshing sort of answer. Dan had always been an unbelievably picky eater.

She rinsed out the glass and began to dry it. “I could whip up some eggs or some pancakes if you want,” she said. “How hungry are you?” She leaned out to one side to place the glass back in her cupboard. In the window above the sink, she saw him tip his head a little, his gaze aimed at the front of her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She got her arms back down in a hurry and busied herself with the remaining plate.

“It is a difficult question to answer,” he said after a pause. “I do not know how to compare hungry. My English is serviceable in many respects, but I am coming to understand better its limitations. The use of the TV is a help to me.”

Daria stacked the clean plate in the cupboard and emptied the sink. She washed it out, watching him discretely in the window and listening to him pick through his words in his careful, measured way. For no reason at all, and certainly not with any conscious thought, she feigned a yawn and a stretch, arching her back and reaching for the ceiling, letting her breasts push out the front of her t-shirt in two distinct handfuls.

Tagen’s voice slowed and stopped. After a moment, he began again, but not in the same vein. “May I ask a question, Daria Cleavon? I suspect it will make you uncomfortable.”

She looked at him, instinctively stepping back and crossing her arms over her chest. “What?” she said warily.

He averted his eyes, searching the walls around him as though for a hidden script. At last he looked at her again, visibly steeled against her. “What is the function of breasts?” he asked.

She couldn’t quite process that right away. It was as though he had asked what fingers were for. “Well, they…Some people think…” She trailed off and stared at him, blinking.

He waited, watching her intently. His eyes, those piercing hawk-like eyes, never wavered.

It was an anatomy lesson. Well, what did she think? Of course he wasn’t really checking her out. He was an alien. Or she was, or whatever.

“Mostly, they’re for nursing babies,” she said. “I mean, that’s the big-picture reason for having them. But they’re also a, um, attractive part of the female body for a lot of people.” She could feel herself blushing, but Tagen merely nodded. “It’s not polite to talk about people’s breasts,” she finished, and started pulling mixing bowls and pans out of their places.

“I do not know the words ‘nursing babies’.” He pronounced this oddly: nur seen bay bees. After a moment, during which she did not answer, he said, “Babies is more than one? More than one…bab?”

“Baby,” she corrected. “A little human. A…you know, a baby.”

“Ah. Offspring. Yes.” He waited. “And what is nur seen?”

“When the baby is first born, its mother makes milk to feed it. From her breasts,” she added as Tagen’s eye went to the refrigerator.

He rocked back and stared at her. “Do you really?” he asked. He made it sound like she’d told him a mother could produce pink champagne from one boob and working parts for a radio from the other.

“Well, what do your females do?” she asked. “I assume you do have females.”

“Of course we have,” he said, looking astonished. “But they do not nur seen. Nothing I know of nur seens apart from a very few small animals.”

“It’s nurses, Tagen. Babies nurse. The act is called nursing. Nurse, nurses plural, nursed past tense, nursing verb.”

He processed this for a few seconds, his eyes shut, and then looked at her and said, “Jotan young do not nurse,” and raised an eyebrow at her.

She nodded, and said, “What do they eat when they’re first born, then?”

“Everything,” he said, with a thin smile. “It must be soft, that is all. In the past, I suppose, females would chew the…the baby’s food first. Now there is food sold especially for them.”

“Well, we have milk sold especially for our babies, too, but a lot of mothers prefer to nurse anyway.” She was out of the danger zone for this conversation and her curiosity was piqued, so as she began to mix pancake batter, she said, “So your females don’t have breasts?”

“No.”

“What do they have?”

He cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“How can you tell each other apart if they don’t have breasts?”

“Ah.” He sat back in his chair as Daria began pouring pancakes onto the hot griddle. “Much the same way you humans do, I think. Females are smaller. Slimmer. And we can smell the difference, understand.”

“Smell…? Seriously?”

“Oh yes.”

There was a sincerity in his voice that made Daria wonder, just for an uneasy instant, if he could smell her, too. She didn’t ask. A thought occurred to her, though, and she turned all the way around to say, “But you’re a man, right? Or are you?”

He seemed dramatically taken aback, and for a second or two, insulted. Then he looked down at his chest, glanced at hers, and relaxed slightly. “Yes,” he said. “I am male.” He muttered something in his language, and then added, “I suppose I should have anticipated that.”

Daria brought him the first two pancakes on a plate, along with some syrup and a fork. He grasped the utensil with an air of uncertainty, but did not ask for instruction. He ate slowly, as one doing it for the first time. His expression was mildly bewildered.

“Is it okay?” she asked.

“It is…sweet.” He looked up at her, his brow beetling. “Everything you eat is so sweet.”

She’d never thought about, but now that he mentioned it, it was true. “Not everything,” she argued vaguely. “The soup I gave you that first day was minestrone. That’s salty, not sweet. And you don’t have to have syrup, you know.”

“I like sweet,” he said, considering his plate. “I am just not accustomed to it in such abundance.” He finished his pancake and she came to give him two more. “Will you not eat?”

“In a bit. I might as well finish cooking first.” She hadn’t made very much batter. Enough for four more pancakes, maybe. Two more for him, and two for her.

“Hm.”

It was a darkly judicial sound, and Daria glanced around, suddenly defensive. “What?”

“I said nothing.”

She put the hand that held the spatula on her hip and glared at him. “Spit it out, spaceman.”