Page 51 of I Punched an Alien and Now We’re in Couples Therapy

“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes, I ran off, there’s a goddamn kaiju!” A roar outside punctuated my point.

Osid raised a brow. “And what if he caught you?”

“Who’s catching me, hoe? I’m a runner, I’m a track star. This is all your fault!”

“My fault?!”

“Yes! This is your fault for thinking I’d be slow enough to get captured. In the future, when we see a monster, we run, okay?”

“In the future, I expect you to run to me!”

I stared at him in disbelief, then down at myself, then around me.

“What are you looking for?” he snapped.

“The army or Gundam or other such deus ex machina that you assume I’d be able to pull out of my ass that would’ve helped you. What exactly did you expect me to do other than run? The question is, why did you take so long to get here? Look, I don’t know how it works on your home planet, but when you see a Black person run on my planet, you run. That’s usually a pretty solid indicator that you don’t want to be around whatever’s going down. You don’t ask no questions, you don’t ask for directions, you run!”

“What is a Gundam?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not important. But look, you’re here now, you made it. Good for you.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to help me,” he growled. “I thought you’d gotten snatched up and tucked into that red sack when I wasn’t looking. Do you have any idea what I went through trying to rescue you?”

I paused and took in his disheveled appearance. His cloak had a litany of new tears. Soot was marred across half his face while bits of shredded wire clung to the spikes of his horns. I rose from my chair and plucked a flickering red Christmas light from his hair and tossed it into the trash bin beside the counter. “Did you actually climb into that monster’s sack?”

“Yes,” he all but snarled back at me.

My head tilted. “Now why the hell would you go and do a stupid thing like that?”

Osid’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates. He whirled around and muttered something under his breath, then turned back to me, closed the distance between us, grabbed me by the shoulders, and shook once. “I thought you were captured.”

“And you risked yourself for that?”

“Yes,” he said, eyes wild. “Why do I need to explain this to you? You’re my queen, of course I wasn’t going to flee while you were in the belly of a beast. You can’t just disappear like that.”

Hand on one hip, I raised a finger and counted off. “One, still haven’t agreed to be your queen, two, I don’t know what would possess you to think I was gonna run my escape plan by you in the middle of being chased by a monster, but you are gonna have to lower your expectations of me by quite a bit—”

“Understatement,” he cut in.

“Shut up. Three, you made it, so it’s fine.”

Osid took a slow, measured breath. He blinked once, twice, very slowly, as if needing to reset his vision. “Wicked Thing, I’m curious. Why do you act like that?”

I stared, nonplussed.

“Why?” he asked again, more stress in his voice now. “Wh-what are you trying to accomplish? What are you getting out of this obstinate nonsense?”

My mouth fell open. “I’m obstinate?”

He recoiled back as if from a physical shock. “How is that even a question? Yes!”

“Osid, you chased me all over the damn forest just because I gave you some head.”

“That’s not the…” He paused. “The whole reason, and you know it. But you don’t ever take a second to try and understand anyone else’s perspective. It’s just petty selfishness, over and over.”

A startled laugh escaped me, more out of reflex than humor. “Those are some rich accusations coming from you. Mr. You’re My Wife Whether You Like It or Not. Mr. Chase Your Ass Through Hell and High Water—”

“You would have been blown up by those bomber birds if I hadn’t chased after you!”