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XYREK

She tried to sabotage my ship for a second time!

I should have been outraged. Instead, I felt… amused. Something I hadn't felt in a very, very long time. As exasperating as this female was, she was also utterly endearing. I liked the way she was standing up to me, how she didn't cave even under my most intense glare. One that had made grown males weep. Tom, for example. The male had been about to shit in his pants. Not her, though. Oh no.

She was wary of me and scared, but she wasn't backing down. I admired the fire in her; it spoke of a strong character. As a result, I found myself looking forward to talking to her. Something else that was new to me.

I didn't have to say anything to her. But I wanted to. I wanted to fill her in on what I had discovered. She deserved to know and make up her own mind.

In a few days, we would reach Astrionis, and there, our paths would lead us in different directions. But until we reached our destination, I wanted to spend some time with her, if only to figure out why the universe had decreed we were fated mates.

From everything I read, I thought being fated to each other was supposed to come with a big boom, like being hit by a lightning bolt. Well, the lightning bolt was there, but only when we touched. I would like to at least unravel this puzzle before I work on the others. It seemed more manageable.

In order to do so, I needed to get to know her better, which suddenly seemed less of a hardship than I expected.

For once, nobody hovered in the hallway to my quarters; they were all still piled up in the cargo hold. I hoped they would band together and take care of the newcomers or, at the very least, direct them towards the stocked nutrition dispensers and let them know which of the three bathrooms they could use.

The door to my room opened, and I waved Alice in ahead of me. "Take a seat. I'll be with you in a moment."

"What do you mean, you'll be with me in—" She broke off when I opened a few cubes in front of me, staring at them incredulously.

"Are those computer screens?"

Her fingers hovered in the air. She touched one, and it flipped. "Incredible!"

Amused, I watched her as she browsed through the screens. I knew she couldn't read a word. It was all in Pandraxian, the general language of the universe. Maybe later, I would give her some translation contacts, or I might even change the comms settings so she could read it in her language; for now, I had work to do.

I let her amuse herself with one of the cubes while I pulled up another to ready a large order. Something I should have done a long time ago, but I hadn't anticipated that my guests would be with me for so long and hadn't wanted to make a stop. At least I could rectify that error now. This planet offered everything we needed; I just had to make sure I bought from reputable sources and not slave traders.

"This is really amazing." Alice kept turning the cube.

"What else do you need besides clothes, pillows, and blankets?" I asked as I filled in the items to order.

"What do you mean?" She was still distracted.

"For comfort. I should have had those things aboard earlier, but I didn't know there would be so many of you. So what else do you need?"

That finally stopped her, and she stared at me. "Are you serious?"

I nodded.

"Why now?"

I closed my eyes, channeling my inner patience. Always with the questions. So many endless questions. "Because I haven’t had a chance to do so before. Now we're here, and I can, so what else?"

"Where exactly is here?"

That made my patience meter overflow. "Do you need other things or not?" I growled.

"Whoa, Mister Short Circuit, keep your pants on. Give me a sec. You can't just throw this at me and expect me to be ready."

I had no idea what most of her words meant, but I gathered she needed some time to think. We weren't technically in a hurry, but I would like to be far away from Morrakbarr before somebody decided to retaliate for the dead Pronex. I was sure Khuf had some friends here.

"We need hygiene articles," Alice said after a moment's pause.

"Hygiene articles?" I echoed. "There's soap and?—"

She waved her hand in the air, and her face turned red, a most appealing look, "For when one of us women menstruates?"

"Menstruates?"

"Oh my God," her face turned redder. "You know that women bleed once a month, right? Or wait…" she scrunched up her nose, "do alien women not do that?"

I had no idea what she was talking about. "We have healing wands and bandages."

"Fuck me. I'm about to give an alien a female anatomy class," Alice mumbled to herself. "Fine, look." She took a deep breath. "Earth women," she stressed both words, "bleed once a month from their vaginas." She stared at me. "You know what a vagina is, right?"

I nodded; of course I knew what a vagina was; I just… oh!

"You mean during fertility season?" I finally understood.

"Yeah, something like that," she nodded. "So we need something to… to catch the flow of blood."

"How often are human females in season?" I wanted to know, not that it mattered, but I was curious.

She sighed as if she took affront to my words, but kept her voice even. "Once a month."

"Once a month?" I asked incredulously. "Once a month? Are you sure?"

"Well, I'm a woman, so yeah," she inhaled and added louder, "I'm sure!"

And then, "How often do… alien women… go into… season?"

"It depends on the species," I tried to recall my faint knowledge of female seasons; it wasn't something I’d ever dealt with. "But most, like, once a year?"

"Once a year?" She looked dreamy. "That must be nice."

I thought about it for a moment. "I suppose if that happens, I could make one of the rooms available for the female so she can choose her partner and breed."

"What?" Alice glared at me.

Now what did I say? I thought that was a generous offer.

"Well, if they need to mate, they can use one of the rooms. How long do their seasons last? Do they all have it at the same time?"

She stared at me as if I had lost my mind. But then something must have clicked in her head because her features softened. "Oh."

"What?"

"You think that… when you say females going into season… you actually mean they’re fertile and need to… breed?"

I didn't understand why she looked so put out when saying those words. Was she embarrassed? This was a normal, natural way of life. Then again, I had never heard of females being in season that often. How many offspring did they have, anyway? And how long did the gestation last? It couldn’t be long if they were in season every month. They must have… Wait, if that was the case, there should have been more children around. I was missing something.

"What am I missing?"

"Okay, so first, human women don't go into heat like an animal. We ovulate, which means our body prepares us for pregnancy, offspring, young ones, or whatever you call it. We don't need to mate during that time. When we bleed, it's actually too late. Anyway, ninety-nine percent of the time, we don't get pregnant during a monthly cycle, so then we bleed. For that bleeding, we need hygiene articles, like tampons or pads, to catch the blood."

I made a face. "Tampons?"

She lifted her little finger, "It's like cotton. It goes up into your vagina to catch?—"

I raised both hands and made a loud humming sound. "Uhm, thank you. No, I don't think we have that."

"Fine," she huffed, "how about pads then?" Before I had a chance to ask what those were, she elucidated, holding up part of her shirt, "Just some absorbent material we can put into our underwear would suffice. Something there's a lot of, that we can throw away. I guess we can wash it if we need to. Oh," she looked up, "and underwear. We need a lot of underwear. Please."

I searched the database for something that would suffice and nodded when I put the orders in. "Anything else?"

"Well, there are some kids here. Do you have some toys?" She squinted her eyes at me. “You do have toys, right?"

"Of course, we have toys. I'll get some comms, too, for all of you; that should help pass the time."

"We wouldn't be able to read it." She objected.

"I can fix that." The words were out before an idea occurred to me, and with a sardonic grin, I added, "Or maybe you can."

"You're funny," she smiled widely, actually smiled, and she looked very beautiful doing so. "I'm an engineer, not a computer programmer."

"You're admitting a weakness?" I teased.

Her smile deepened, doing something strange to my heart; it felt as if it was swelling.

"Maybe," she teased right back. Frygg. She was amazing.