Page 14 of Married to the Alien Mountain Man (Cowboy Colony Mail-Order Brides #5)

14

OAKEN

I had another serving of Jaya’s delightful stew. Then, replete, I washed my bowl, my spoon, and the pot before putting the items away.

In all that time, Jaya did not return.

Despite my weariness after the day’s events and my ankle’s lingering soreness, I found I could not make myself sit back down again. I paced the room, trying to balance the privacy Jaya deserved with the protection I longed to give her.

Perhaps humans took much longer in an outhouse than a Zabrian might. Nothing in the book Tasha wrote seemed to indicate such a thing, but neither had it said that humans were particularly quick when relieving themselves, either.

So I waited, and paced, and dug my fangs into the inside of my cheek as questions pecked at me.

What if she fell? And for some reason, she could not get up? The outhouse was not far from the house, but was it possible that she had gotten lost? What if she broke her delicate human ankle, and was now alone in the grass, waiting for her husband to help her?

Of course, I hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. And if she’d called for help, my ears would have picked up on the sound.

Panic sloshed through my belly.

What if she could not call for help because she was unconscious? What if she was choking? What if –

“Blast,” I hissed. I yanked open the door.

Only to find Jaya standing there, right on the other side.

“Oh!” she squeaked, blinking up at me. “Hi!”

My heart had only barely recovered from my earlier worries about her. And now, it was being pummelled by her prettiness. I was going to die a very early death at this rate.

Ah, well. I would just have to accept the risk.

“Um. The outhouse is free. I was just… Just enjoying the fresh air out here.”

“Were you?” I asked, noticing the tiny bumps cascading down the bare lengths of her arms. “You have caboosebumps.”

Jaya’s brows crashed together. “Excuse me?”

“You’re cold, aren’t you? I’m talking about these,” I said, skimming a fingertip gently up her arm, from elbow to shoulder. But this only seemed to make the caboosebumps more pronounced.

A violent shiver wracked her small frame.

Yes, there was no doubt about it. My human wife was cold.

“Come back inside,” I urged, now plagued with new worries about keeping her body temperature in the correct range.

“Alright. But just for a bit,” she said. Her focus appeared to move upwards, above my eyes. “I want to do something before I go back to my ship for the night.”

Her ship for the night. So she still wanted to do that.

Well, there was nothing for it. If that’s what she wanted, that’s what she would get. I had a tent. It was still bundled in my pack from when I’d gone out travelling to meet Magnolia in the spring.

“What is it you want to do before leaving?” I asked as I held the door wider. She passed by me, so close that her caboosebumpy arm brushed my front. Every microspan of my body went briefly taut with the sensation.

“I want to take a look at your head,” she said, returning to the kitchen.

“Truly, my head is fine,” I assured her. “The warden was exaggerating when he talked about me having a concussion.” The last thing I wanted was my capable, clever new wife thinking I was not operating at full capacity.

“Still,” she said, retrieving a small clean rag. “Let me have a look.”

It was unnecessary, but she had asked, and I found that I could deny her nothing. Realizing I’d be too tall if I remained standing, I sat back down at my small kitchen table. As I waited for her, I watched her as she bent over the sink, running the rag under water from the tap.

It was so very odd, being confronted with a tailless backside in person. Of course, I’d been around Magnolia for some time now, and she had no tail, either. But I’d never really found myself preoccupied by the lack of hers the way I was with Jaya’s. Jaya’s legs seemed long for a human female’s – at least, they were longer than Magnolia’s. Her tight trousers emphasized the slender shape of her thighs, leading my eye helplessly up to their apex.

In the book, I’d seen at least one image of a human male rutting into his woman from behind.

My flesh stirred, then swelled, in my trousers.

I quickly scooted my chair in to the table, so that the now unbearably-tight crotch of my pants was hidden beneath the tabletop. The legs of the chair scraped loudly against the floorboards as I did so.

“Everything alright back there?” Jaya asked, wringing out the cloth and then looking at me from over her shoulder.

“Of course,” I told her weakly. I was merely in danger of ejaculating untouched for the second time today. Not that I would tell her that. A good Zabrian male maintained control at all times.

I couldn’t even control my eyes around her, let alone my cock. No need to draw attention to the latter.

“Here,” Jaya said, crossing the kitchen floor to me. “I just want to clean you up a bit.”

“Thank you,” I said. I reached for the cloth, only to discover that Jaya apparently meant she wanted to do it herself. Dual urges warred within me.

The urge to take the cloth from her, to wordlessly let her know that I was a competent male, more than capable of taking care of both myself and her…

And the urge to give in and let her touch me.

The second urge proved the greatest. I let my hand fall to the table.

Jaya’s touch was firm but gentle as she swiped the cool, damp cloth along my forehead.

“Close your eyes, big guy.” She hummed, her breath heating my skin.

“Big… Guy…?” I closed them as requested so that she could run the cloth over my eyebrows and eyelids.

“Does ‘guy’ translate?” she asked. “It’s an informal word for a person, often with a male connotation. And big is obviously just… big.”

So she was calling me a big, male person? I was not sure if that was good, bad, or something in between.

I opened my eyes once more. Which was probably a bad idea. Because while they’d been closed, Jaya had seated herself upon the table to continue her work, and now my face was exactly level with the tantalizing human swells on her chest.

Jaya was slender, the lines of her body a little straighter and leaner than those on Magnolia or Tasha’s frames. Her bosoms were certainly nowhere near as large as the warden’s wife’s.

To my eyes, they were absolutely perfect. I considered it something of a miracle that I was allowed to observe her bosoms from such close proximity this way.

I should let her hit me in the head with a hammer more often…

“You know,” Jaya murmured, her voice washing over me the same way her intoxicating human scent was, “you’re probably the only guy I’ve let stare at my boobs this long without getting snarky.”

“What?” I asked, lost in the blissful, arousing haze of sitting by Jaya and letting her touch me while her small bosoms shifted with each of her gentle movements. Perhaps, if she leaned in close enough, one of those lovely bumps might even hit me in the face…

A man could hope.

“My chest, Oaken. You haven’t blinked those big white eyes of yours in over a minute.”

“Oh. Oh!” I dragged my gaze away from her chest. “Sorry. Is that… Is that rude?”

If it was rude, she did not seem angry about it.

“It can be, yeah,” she said. “But I get it. You’re up close and personal with a female from another species. There’s bound to be curiosity.”

“You are not just the first female from another species I’ve been this close to,” I admitted. “You are the first female of any sort that I’ve been this close to… Well, since my mother died.”

Her hand stilled at my hairline.

“How old were you?” she whispered.

“I was very young. Five cycles.”

Jaya blinked rapidly, then appeared to focus very hard on one specific place on my forehead.

“My mom died when I was five, too. Both my parents did.”

“What happened?” I asked. I did not like that she shared this sad thing with me. But I was glad that, at least if she had to bear it, she could bear it alongside someone who understood.

“They both worked in the same zone of an engine factory on Terratribe I. One of the safety features failed, a machine overheated, and there was an explosion.” Her hand drifted up to clean my ear, but I plucked the cloth from her hand.

“I will do this part,” I said quietly. If Jaya started stroking one of my ears now, then my involuntary orgasm was all but guaranteed. And the thought of ejaculating while Jaya shared the tragedy of her childhood with me was an unforgivably appalling thought. I wiped down my bloodied ear rather forcefully, feeling the flesh sting.

“What happened to your parents?” Jaya asked.

“My father died before I was born,” I explained. “My mother had a chronic lung condition that got progressively worse after I was born. It made her especially susceptible to infections. She became very ill one winter, and her heart was under too much stress to continue.”

“Shit. I’m sorry,” Jaya said. I would have been confused by this if I had not read Tasha’s book. It was common for humans to express their condolences for the grief of others by apologizing. I found it very odd, but also rather charming. It was like she was trying to somehow take responsibility for my loss, even though it really had nothing to do with her.

“I am sorry to you, too” I said, putting down the cloth.

A smile tugged at her lips.

“Not sorry to me,” she corrected gently. “You can just say, ‘I’m sorry,’ or, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

She moved her head up and down in a human gesture of acknowledgement.

“Thanks. It worked out OK in the end, though. My Aunty Anjali swooped in and saved me.”

She laced her fingers together in her lap.

“I was so young when my parents died. And I know I was really sad at the time. But what I remember feeling most was fear. Because they had been my anchors, you know? But what good is an anchor if it can just be severed like that? And leave you totally unmoored? In the blink of an eye, it was like everything I ever knew got thrown over the edge of a fucking cliff. I didn’t know where I’d go, who I’d live with, if I’d even survive the foster care system.”

Her smile returned.

“But then there was Aunty Anjali, coming to get me in her very own ship. Which was just so amazingly cool, because up until then, I didn’t know anyone who had their own ship. She was like… Like a superhero or something. She could go anywhere, do anything. Never trapped, never lost. At home wherever she went. No anchors. No fear.”

Though we may have lost our mothers around the same time in our lives, clearly our experiences after this event differed wildly. Like Jaya, I had been sent to live with a family member – my uncle, Garrek’s father. Unlike Jaya, I did not find that period of my life to be one of liberation. My uncle did not, as Jaya had said, “swoop in to save me.” Instead, he frightened me, jeered at me, beat his own son in front of me. When he tried to beat me, too, he earned his own death at Garrek’s hands, and thus set our course for this place.

But perhaps, in a way, he had liberated me after all. Because I’d always felt freer here in this penal colony than I had back on Zabria.

And this had, in turn, put me in the right place, at the right time, to meet Jaya.

It was poignant, and more than a little painful, to think about how the agonies of our lives, the disasters that have the power to throw everything into chaos, could also, one day, put us on the path of something good.

Jaya was something good.

“I understand now,” I said softly, “why you are so attached to your ship.”

“Yeah. I inherited the Lavariya after Aunty Anjali died. It’s been my home for more than twenty years.”

“Lavariya… This word does not translate.”

“It’s her name. The ship’s name,” she clarified. “It’s the name of an Old-Earth dish from Sri Lanka. A type of sweet coconut dumpling. It’s really good with tea. It was my Aunty Anjali’s favourite food. Plus, the ship is kind of shaped like one.”

“It is interesting that you name your ships this way. And assign them genders.”

“Zabrians don’t do that?” She hopped down off the table. “Must be a human thing. We can be weirdly sentimental like that.”

Yet another facet of human culture that I found charming. It was entirely adorable that Jaya loved a ship named after something as sweet as a dumpling.

I was very glad I could play some small part in keeping that ship in her life.

Even if that very ship would be the thing to carry her away from me one day.