The Alien's Patient Read online

  “But I am on this ship.”

  “Yes. I know,” he said. “But perhaps you can understand, if you’re not supposed to be on the ship, I’m definitely not supposed to be sleeping with you.”

  “Eh,” Faith shrugged. “So what?”

  “So I have a code,” he said. “And that code has been not just broken, but shattered.”

  “Well, that’s the problem with codes. They’re so easily broken.” Faith grinned, snuggling into the warm spots they had made together with their bodies. “You know, you could make a girl feel bad about herself with all this whining.”

  “I am not whining,” he snapped the words at her.

  “Oh, yes, you are. You’re whimpering like a little puppy dog.” Faith held her hands up like paws under her chin and made her eyes all wide. “Oh, no, I put a woman on my ship even though I wasn’t supposed to, and then I had sex with her and now I feeeeel badddd.”

  Serkan’s expression became one of outrage. “Are you mocking me, human?”

  “My name is Faith Rockford,” Faith said. “And yes, I am.”

  He turned and made for the door. Faith knew when she was being walked out on. This had all the signs of it.

  “Careful,” she shouted after him as he left. “If you don’t stop pouting, I might not sleep with you again.”

  * * *

  Serkan left his bedroom in a temper. He knew none of this was Faith’s fault, but the little human woman had an ability to get under his skin in both good ways and bad. He was very close to thrashing her soundly—but he knew if he did, he would not be doing it for her benefit so much as to release his tension, and that was not fair.

  He locked the door and went up to the bridge to watch the universe passing by. Sitting in his captain’s chair, Serkan took a deep breath and took stock of his situation.

  “You did this,” he told himself. “You did all of it. It’s not her fault. She’s not responsible for any of this, morally or legally.”

  According to his law, Faith barely had the capacity to consent to what they had just done. Sex with humans was not unheard of, but it was frowned upon. They were the weaker species. Mating with them was seen as taking advantage. Was that what he had done? Serkan ran his fingers through his hair and played the chain of events over in his mind again.

  He had made direct contact with a human. Taken her aboard his ship. Left the solar system with her. And he had slept with her.

  Four crimes, each worse than the one before it. Serkan was not a lawbreaker. He was a man of honor, a well-regarded physician and warrior. For that reason, Ephemera had chosen him to go to Earth. Few were permitted to visit the distant colonies—and fewer still were allowed to see the green and blue planet where the genome was thriving in human form. It was whispered that Earth was corrupted, and that it corrupted those who visited it. Serkan had dismissed those rumors as the jealous comments of those who would never approach the system where Earth sailed. Now he wondered if he should not have paid more attention to them.

  It was an alluring planet in so many respects, yet to be fully civilized, full of wildlife and human activity going on unchecked. The humans had little resistance to gross natural events. Fire, wind, water, earth, all the elements seemed to do battle with them, often to great ill effect. And yet the humans persevered.

  Serkan could have stayed longer, watching Earth. He could possibly have stayed years, if the council would allow him such a luxury. But it was not to be. His medical sabbatical was at an end—and it had ended with an unfortunate transgression against every law Serkan was aware of.

  He could smell her on him still. The human. His cock was slicked with her juices, slowly drying against his skin. There was a part of him, a part he would have denied under direct questioning, that did not regret what he had done at all. It had been the most natural thing in the world to sink inside her, to find heaven in a human’s loins. She was so hot, so wet, so welcoming. Mating with Faith had been a transcendent experience for Serkan, and if he had not done it under a pall of lawbreaking, he would have been ecstatic.

  The universe passed by outside the shuttle windows and Serkan found a new emotion replacing the guilt that had pierced his pleasure… desire. Not the animal, sexual desire that had prompted their mating, but a softer impulse. He found, to his surprise, that he missed her company already.

  He found himself rising from his chair and returning to his chambers. So much of his behavior was becoming automatic, he found it somewhat thrilling and equally concerning. Serkan had always been able to rely on rationality and force of will to make his decisions. With this human arousing his instincts, he was starting to realize that he was not as advanced as he had once thought himself to be.

  Serkan went back to his bedroom, where he found Faith bundled up under the covers. A few locks of her hair were visible. Aside from that, she was hidden beneath the soft folds.

  “Human?” He spoke gently, not wanting to startle her, or wake her if she was sleeping.

  “Go away.”

  She spoke while remaining beneath the blankets, so it was as if his own bed had grown a voice and dislike of him.

  Serkan walked up to the bed and pulled the covers back to reveal his human guest. She was curled up on herself and made a fruitless grab for the blanket as it slid away from her naked body.

  “Give that back!” she complained. “I’m cold!”

  She didn’t look very happy. Unless he was very much mistaken, there were dried tears on her lower lashes and traces of them down her cheeks where they had made the makeup she certainly didn’t need run. He felt a pang of guilt at realizing she must have cried when he left. She hadn’t looked hurt, but little creatures like Faith never let anyone see when they were in pain.

  “Are you sore? Did the sex hurt you?” Serkan lifted the blanket back over her.

  “The sex didn’t hurt me,” she said, grabbing it and tucking it all the way up under her chin so that just her cute face with those spitting green eyes was looking at him. “You did when you walked out on me. Asshole.”

  She was not one of the human females who used an indirect method of communication largely comprised of making the other person guess what she was feeling, and for that he was glad. She was rude, but at least she made sense. And she was right.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For how I acted after we mated. I have my own problems to deal with. They are not yours, and they are not your fault. I should not have taken them out on you.”

  “When I sleep with a guy, I prefer it if he doesn’t call me a whore and storm out.”

  “I didn’t do either of those things.” Serkan was momentarily confused by her exaggeration. He sat down on the bed next to her and reached out a hand toward her, but she pushed it away.

  “Not directly, maybe, but indirectly. We both know what’s happening here. You made choices and then you felt bad once the fun part wore off. Well, you know what?” She reached out and poked him in the chest, her finger surprisingly pointy and hard against Serkan’s skin. “The regretful good boy act is already old. I don’t mind playing the slutty Jezebel sometimes, but you can’t blame me for everything. Plus, you hurt my feelings.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, Faith, I am.”

  “Sure you are,” she said. “I guess I believe that you’re an alien, but you’re not really any different from any guy I ever met on Earth. They like the bad girls for their fun, but they get scared and they run. And they leave the girl with the consequences.”

  There was a weight to her words that caught his attention. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  He didn’t believe that for a second. The hurt he saw in Faith’s eyes was bigger than what had just taken place between them. But she had no reason to trust him enough to tell him. He hadn’t earned that trust. They’d mated, but they were still strangers in every sense of the word. Very strange strangers too, from worlds so far apart that by all the laws of nature, they should never have encountered one an
other.

  “I can get some clothes made for you,” he said. “I’ve got a machine that can fabricate almost anything. It has human dress from the fourteenth century onwards loaded onto it. Do you want to get cleaned up, put on some new clothes, maybe eat something?”

  “Maybe,” she said, looking at him warily. “Are you going to freak out on me again?”

  “No more freak-outs,” Serkan said. “I promise.”

  Faith gave him a long look and nodded. “Well,” she said. “I guess now’s a good a time as any to find out if you really have alien technology, or if your special clothing machine is two rat-infested, pee-soaked shoeboxes tied to a tree stump.”

  Serkan snorted at her colorful speech. “That’s quite an image you paint.”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve slept with crazier.” She swung her legs out of the bed, taking the blanket with her as a form of clothing. “Show me your ship, Captain Alien.”

  He shouldn’t allow her out of the bedroom, but Serkan was tired of counting all the rules he was breaking. The woman needed clothing, she needed food, and they were going to be stuck on the ship for a good few days yet. They may as well get comfortable.

  Chapter Four

  Faith followed Serkan across the room. He seemed to be trying to make amends for his shitty behavior, but she didn’t forgive him yet. So much for afterglow. She’d been unable to stop herself from crying after she left, a fact that she hated even more than how he’d acted. She shouldn’t care what this guy did. She shouldn’t care what any guy did. Men were jerks. She was surprised she could still be surprised by that fact. When was she going to learn that there was no such thing as a Prince Charming? Even the ones who seemed to be helping her always turned out to be in it for themselves.

  He was hot. Maybe that was why she had forgotten her golden rule. She found her gaze lingering on his muscular ass and powerful thighs. His cock was out of this world too. Thick and hot and… she forcibly made herself stop thinking about his genitals. That was how she’d gotten herself into trouble. Again.

  “Here you are,” Serkan said, sliding what looked like a closet door open. Instead of a rack of clothes, there was just an empty space with a little interface on one side. “Just step in,” he said, indicating that she should get into the closet space.

  Faith wasn’t sure about getting into such a little space, but she figured he was more than strong enough to tie her up and keep her in a tiny box if he wanted and he didn’t seem inclined to so far. He probably wasn’t going to start by tricking her with a pretend magic closet.

  She stepped into the space and looked at the screen on one of the walls. Serkan reached out and swiped his finger over the display pad. It looked a lot like some of the more advanced pieces of consumer tech Faith was familiar with, displaying the mesh outlines of various clothes one after the other. There were symbols that she couldn’t read, angular jagged bits and pieces with dots here and there and rounded structures almost like flower petals. So that’s what an alien language looked like. Like hieroglyphics got drunk and ended up in some old lady’s garden.

  “What would you like to wear?”

  “I don’t know,” Faith said. “Show me your weirdest stuff.”

  “Hmmm… my weirdest stuff?”

  “Yeah. I want to be avant garde. Show me something really out there.”

  “Okay.” He tapped through the screen. “Hold still now,” he said. “The machine can make you feel a little tingly, but that’s normal. The tingling is a vibrational cleaning system which will remove any debris from your skin.”

  “Does it do cum?” She looked at him brazenly. “Someone left a lot of cum in me.”

  “It cleans semen, yes,” Serkan said, appearing to miss her sarcasm.

  Faith stood there as the closet began to hum. She felt little prickly tingles running over her skin and then the strangest sensation as clothing coalesced around her. She looked down at herself to find that she was wearing a patterned collared shirt, a bold pink tutu over long brown shorts, and a pair of work boots.

  “From a movie, I believe,” Serkan smirked at her. “It’s pretty out there, isn’t it?”

  “This isn’t avant garde,” she said, stripping the clothes off and tossing them into the bedroom. “Try again, Mr. Alien.”

  Serkan swiped through the menus again, too quickly for her to see what he was doing. The tingly sensation started all over again and this time what formed about her body was quite tight around her chest and waist, and very heavy and long. She looked down at herself to see a full Victorian gown about her body, silk and satin and lace flowing all over the place.

  “Elegant,” Serkan noted. “It suits you more than you might think it would.”

  “I want something edgy,” she said after doing the mandatory princess twirl, which was more difficult than she thought it would be. “I can’t move in this dress.”

  “Clothing you can’t move in might keep you out of trouble,” Serkan said, straight-faced. Faith made a rude gesture in his direction, glad for the fact that fifty yards of fabric kept her ass free from any consequences as he rubbed his hands together with that disciplinary look in his eye.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “Maybe on your planet, spanking people is acceptable, but it’s not where I’m from, so don’t do that again.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “If there is one thing I can guarantee, it is that my palm will meet your bottom again in the very near future,” he promised. “You are trouble, human, and you will be dealt with accordingly.”

  “Smack me again, and you’ll lose your hand.”

  “Threaten me again, and you’ll lose your ability to sit,” he said, becoming suddenly stern and serious in a way she didn’t like one bit. They glared at one another, green meeting silver in a battle of wills. Faith knew she was going to lose. All this technology aside, she was the captive of a much stronger creature—one who was currently playing dress-up with her as if she were a doll. She should be objecting more, but it was actually pretty fun.

  “Let me try with the screen,” she said, changing the subject. Serkan agreed. It wasn’t that hard to operate and soon Faith was trying on clothes from every period possible. A doublet and pantaloons. A suit of fur from the far North. The wedding dress worn by a pretty princess who recently married an equally pretty prince and went on to have adorably pretty offspring. A blue dress with a significant stain on it. The options were endless, and distracted her admirably from her predicament as a prisoner.

  “Are you going to settle on something soon?”

  Serkan had lost interest after about the tenth clothing change and had retired to the bed to wait her interest out. At his inquiry, Faith peeked out from the closet. She was wearing a dress made of meat. It was about as comfortable as she had imagined it would be.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Why, do we have somewhere to be?”

  “No,” Serkan admitted, dumping a handful of discarded clothes back into the chute, which he had explained broke them down to their composite parts from which fresh clothing could be created. “But you must be getting hungry. I know I am.”

  “Can’t this machine just generate some food inside our bellies?”

  “It’s not that precise a piece of equipment,” Serkan said, taking the question seriously. “And most of the fun in eating is actually eating, not simply becoming full.”

  “Some would say it’s in the cooking too. I bet you don’t cook, though.”

  “You’d lose that bet,” Serkan said. “Real cooked food is far better for you than synthesized food. Even the most elaborate synthesizers have trouble creating perfect ingredient profiles, so the dishes are always flat and usually missing various structures—you would call them vitamins or minerals, which we are yet to isolate. A blade of grass is more complex than you can possibly imagine. Interstellar travel is easy compared to creating good, nutritious food.”

  “Huh,” Faith said. “I never really thought about that before.”

  “Neithe
r did we, until we had to eat synthesized food for extended periods of time and began to become ill as a result. Sometimes, what should work according to all known logic, just doesn’t. The universe is a very strange place. The more we learn, the more we understand that we don’t know.”

  She was finding him handsome again. She really had to stop that. It was difficult when he insisted on being interesting and intelligent in addition to kind and generous and… seriously. She really had to stop. Sleeping with him was one thing, but if she ended up falling for this alien, she’d be so angry with herself.

  After a few more experiments, Faith settled on a pair of black leggings and a long pink t-shirt with a misspelled swear word on it, along with a pair of sneakers. There was a virtual universe of fashion to choose from, but she figured she may as well be comfortable. It felt good to be in familiar attire. She felt a bit more, well, human.

  Serkan stepped inside the machine when she was done and donned what she guessed was his uniform. It was a royal blue suit with silver trim, fitted perfectly to his body. The color of the fabric brought out the silver of his eyes and the lines of the suit emphasized the hard lines of his body.

  She was getting those feelings again. Those dangerous feelings she had to be careful about.

  “You’re making me feel underdressed,” she complained.

  “Sorry,” he smiled. “But I don’t think you could be underdressed.” He reached out and ran his hand across her cheek in a soft caress. “You are a stunning beauty.”

  “I am not,” she blushed. Warning sirens were blaring in her head. He was hot. He was being nice to her. Something bad was almost guaranteed to happen soon.

  “Come,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  She followed him from the bedroom out into the passage beyond. It wasn’t much to look at, just a short passage leading to a few doors.

  “This is the main walkway. The only walkway,” Serkan explained. “This is not a large vessel. I have my laboratory and medical bay, my living quarters, a galley, and the bridge. I prefer to eat on the bridge. It has the best view. Come.”