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I plummeted into the darkness.
Chapter Five
I was warm.
And wet.
And naked.
I opened my eyes to find myself lounging in a wood bathtub outside the back of their cabin. Garret was in the distance, apparently monitoring the property’s parameter while Huck was hanging up my clothes— both today’s shirt and my birthday dress from yesterday— on a clothesline. They appeared damp.
“Blood is hard to get out,” he complained. “And there is a lot. How’s her arm? Are you sure it’s okay with just a bandage?”
“It’s okay,” I murmured, trying to sit up. Suds covered most of my body.
“Relax,” Bo ordered.
Too emotionally drained to fight with him, I did as he asked.
Bo resumed washing me with a cloth. “I…want to apologize.”
“Me too,” I replied quietly, realizing I was in the bath because I had urinated on myself.
“I shouldn’t have told you—”
“I’m glad you did. I wasn’t close with my family, but they were all I had.” I ducked my head. “Strangely, I can’t find it in myself to mourn.”
“You’re in shock.”
He was probably right. I felt emotionally numb as fuck.
Surely that is why I thought it was well and appropriate to look into his eyes and use my palm to cup his cheek like we were lovers or something. I had never felt facial hair before.
“You were right,” I confessed. “I was being petty. I’m deeply sorry.”
Bo placed his hand over mine, pulled it back to expose my palm, and then kissed it. “I know this isn’t easy,” he expressed before letting me have my hand back. “And I know I am asking a lot of you to trust me.”
“The aliens…” I cleared my throat. “Aren’t you all afraid they might kill you for taking me in?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Would you kill a herd of wild cows because your domesticated cow joined them?”
I smiled sadly at his reasoning. “No.”
“The aliens are very much like us, or so we’re told.”
“What stops them from collecting people like you and your brothers and adding them to their herd?”
“They don’t trust our meat.”
I stared blankly at the mind-fuckery of it. He’d said that so matter-of-factly.
“We could be diseased,” he expounded. “Or have parasites, or cancerous tumors.”
I felt my mouth drop.
