Page 23

Ezra

Sprawled across the leather couch of his best friend’s gigantic living room, a bag of cheddar and sour cream flavored chips balanced on his belly, lay a broody, dwelling Ezra.

For the past week he’d been avoiding Titan like the plague, and it had been going surprisingly well…

but while he’d mastered the art of dodging Titan in real life, he was having considerably more difficulty keeping him out of his mind, and it was driving him bonkers.

It was almost as though sex with Titan had completely rewired his brain, and now he was programmed to think of nothing but the soft noises Titan made when he thrust inside him, or the heat of his tongue on his skin.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

That wasn’t what had melted Ezra into the couch like a pathetic loser.

He could have handled it if he was just in his head about some good—okay, great— sex, but something unexpected had happened.

Yesterday, Titan had made him laugh.

It’d been at the end of the work day when one of the silent, nameless government agents had dropped them off at hom e.

Ezra’s regular routine was to mutter his thanks to the driver, then bolt into the mansion as quickly as possible before Titan could ambush him, but this time as he got out of the car, Titan had said to him in an extremely earnest tone of voice, “I will be seeing you later, alligator,” and stopped him in his tracks.

“What’d you just say?”

“I stated that I would be seeing you later, alligator,” he’d repeated with absolute sincerity. “I ascertained that you were going to disappear into your unconsciousness quarters, as you have done each night, so I thought it was appropriate to bid you farewell.”

“I… Where did you learn the phrase ‘see you later, alligator’?”

“It was on an entertainment program. It is a proper English way of saying goodbye, is it not? It is also a call and response. You are now meant to say, ‘In a while, crocodile.’”

“Do you… do you even know what an alligator or a crocodile are?”

Titan had thought about it.

“No,” he’d declared a moment later. He’d then turned bashful, his human disguise reddening in the cheeks. “Did I… I used the phrase correctly, did I not?”

And that was what had sealed the deal, because Ezra was so used to Titan insisting that he was right all the time that to see him actually doubt himself for a moment had been… well, it had been adorable. And endearing. And that was not a word Ezra had ever used to describe Titan before then.

He’d done his best to school his expression into something neutral and said, “Yeah, man, you said it right. In a while, crocodile,” then given him an awkward wave and scurried off to his room, where he had burst into laughter, frustratingly delighted at the whole exchange.

He’d laughed until tears sprang to his eyes—until he was certain he was losing his marbles.

But he hadn’t been able to help it. It was the only way he’d been able to process Titan being sweet.

Except he hadn’t really processed it, because here he was, still thinking about it, and not able to make heads or tails about why he should even care.

It wasn’t like using a silly phrase absolved Titan of being an annoying prick…

but it had done something, because now, whenever Ezra thought about the alien, all he could think was, “Yeah, he’s a dick, but… he also made me laugh.”

Sighing, Ezra cast his bag of chips onto the coffee table and pulled down the silky lap blanket that had been draped over the top of the couch.

He wrapped himself up cocoon style, then rolled over to face the humongous television, hoping he’d be able to lose himself in some mindless entertainment.

If one hundred and fifty inches of HiDef, crystal clear, top-of-the-line QLEDs couldn’t distract him from his woes, nothing could.

He extended an arm from his blanket cocoon for the remote, which was on the coffee table, but it was out of reach.

He scrunched his nose and scooched toward the edge of the couch, but the leather was smooth, and he ended up falling face-first onto the floor while his lower half remained cozy on the couch cushions. “ Goddamn it. ”

He snatched the remote, pushed himself back onto the couch, and cuddled angrily into the blanket. Stupid remote. Stupid slippery couch. Stupid Titan.

There’d better be something amazing on TV.

He turned it on and boosted the volume until it was booming, making it hard to focus on anything else, but it wasn’t of much use, because today it seemed like everything on the air had some kind of horny, romantic subplot.

Out of desperation he switched over to The Weather Channel only to discover they were airing the premiere of their newest program, a lovechild between Survivor and The Bachelor that spanned the course of a year and was set in the wilds of Alaska, titled Love in All Seasons .

Frustrated, he switched over to one of their numerous streaming services and picked the driest documentary h e could find—a twelve-part series on the history of minting coins.

Five minutes in and they were talking about the secret love affair happening behind closed doors during the making of the penny.

He resisted the urge to throw the remote at the screen.

It seemed that he couldn’t win, which was infuriating because this was the first day since Titan had arrived on Earth that Ezra hadn’t seen him around.

God bless the weekend. With the consulate closed, he didn’t have to be stuck in a small room with Titan for hours on end, and as far as he could tell, Titan hadn’t left his bedroom all morning.

Admittedly, it had been a risk to emerge from hiding, but he’d been going stir-crazy from being locked up away from everybody whenever he wasn’t at work.

A guy needed some downtime on the couch with a bag of chips every now and then, and he had to take advantage of this stroke of good luck while he still had it.

It wouldn’t be long before Titan was back to his old ways, roaming the mansion in search of him, ready to pounce the second he detected Ezra’s guard was down.

Why couldn’t the Darvrokian government just supply him with his own house? Or, hell, why not his own town? If he was half the hotshot bigwig he claimed to be, surely the government owed it to him. Al claimed to be a nobody and they’d built him a mansion.

Stupid alien governments.

Stupid—

Approaching footsteps put an abrupt end to Ezra’s bitter thoughts. In a panic, he tossed the remote onto the coffee table and yanked the blanket over his head, flattening himself as much as he could in the hopes no one would notice the human-shaped lump on the couch.

It wasn’t exactly his brightest plan, but desperate times and all that.

The footsteps came closer and he held his breath, channeling his inner possum.

“Human Ez ra?” came Kyle’s perplexed voice.

“Is this how you are meant to use the human comfort object known as a ‘blanket’? Your entertainment transmissions have led me to believe otherwise, but I suppose this is not surprising, as they have also led me to believe that dogs are proficient at solving mysteries. However, none of the dogs I have spoken to are interested in mysteries in the least. They only care for the throwing of balls.”

“Oh thank god, it’s only you.” Ezra breathed a sigh of relief and tugged the blanket off his head, his hair ruffling and going all staticky in the process.

He smoothed it out, peered up, and found Kyle leaning over the back of the couch and looking down at him with a bemused expression.

Ezra hastily pushed himself into a sitting position, the blanket slipping off his shoulders and pooling in his lap.

Clearing his throat, he sheepishly asked, “Um… how’s it going, man? ”

“It is going well,” Kyle said. “I have been attempting to locate you. I had believed that you would be in your unconsciousness quarters, as that has been your usual location as of late, but you did not answer when I knocked.”

“Sorry, yeah, I came down here to get a change of scenery. What’d you need?”

“I was wondering if you have any desire to become a douchebag with me this afternoon.” He produced a vape pen from his pocket that Ezra had gifted him several months prior, after they’d first smoked together.

It had been a fun night. Ezra had been able to sit back and chill, and Kyle had eaten an entire bag of marshmallows dipped in mustard and spent the better part of an hour pondering the question, “What if the colors you perceive are dissimilar to the colors I perceive?”

Kyle had greened out before he’d found the answer, and the next morning Ezra had woken up to find the alien passed out face down on his floor, happily snoring away.

They’d made an occasional habit of repeating the experience ever since.

Kyle twiste d the vape alluringly between his fingers and wiggled his eyebrows, which was to say he lifted his eyebrows one at a time, independently of each other.

He hadn’t quite nailed the art of the true eyebrow wiggle just yet.

“I thought that you might wish to become a douchebag and observe the television program with the competitive baked goods.”

“ The Great British Bake Off ,” Ezra supplied.

He considered the vape pen in Kyle’s hand.

Before he’d become the ambassador to an alien race, he’d rarely spent a day sober, but now the thought of getting high made his stomach roil.

For perhaps the first time in his entire stoner life, he was too anxious for weed.

“I’m not really feeling it today,” he said apologetically. “Thanks, though. I’ll probably just go to my room, maybe watch TikToks of cute animals, and take a nap.” As he said it, he realized that he was exhausted from all the dwelling he’d been doing, and a nap didn’t sound all that bad.

Kyle frowned.

“You have spent many Earth hours in your room this week, Human Ezra. Is your physical form malfunctioning?”