Page 4 of Azyr: Drifiting for Her

Standing in my doorway with my glasses in my hair like an idiot, I realized that there was nobody to hand him to. The reformed IDA ran a one-month introduction window for every arriving match, a window I helped write, built specifically so no human ever again got rushed off the planet the way the first ones were.

It needed an Earth Liaison Officer, and there was exactly one in the Pacific Northwest since Eugene closed. Me. My no still stood. What remained was visitor orientation and departure paperwork, not a month in which I owed him another answer. I could run the administrative part without reopening the match. I intended to be very good at that distinction.

Cosmic. Really. Ten out of ten, no notes.

Competence is a cage with very comfortable bars. I was the only officer, which meant I was the safest possible person to hand a matched alien to, which also meant I was the only person who couldn't hand him off. Except in the rare occasion an alien became too much and needed to be removed from the planet, but that hadn't happened yet. I'd built that safety myself. Made myself indispensable, so I'd never be dispensable. And now I'd been served my own dish.

I thought about calling Ruth. She was retired now, mostly, up in the San Juans with a garden that puts mine to shame. She rarely answered her phone, and she'd have laughed at me, the good laugh, and then said something to put me in my place so I could handle the situation. I didn't call Ruth. Her voice in my mind was enough for me to sigh and take over.

“Come in out of the wet,” I said. “We've got things to sort out, and I'm not doing it on the step.”

He crossed the threshold, and the hallway light caught him just right. For one full second he went a deep living blue, the entire length of him, before he seemed to feel it happen and let it drain back toward gray. Then he took in my hallway all at once, the coat hooks, the crack in the plaster, the little herbs on the sill through the kitchen door, and I got the deeply unsettling sense that he could've redrawn the whole office from memory an hour later, down to the mug I left out.

“You water them in the morning.” His eyes were on the herbs. “The soil's wet on top and dry underneath. You did it today. It didn't need it.”

“That's a weird thing to notice about a woman you've known ninety seconds.”

“I notice everything.” I couldn't tell if that was an apology or a warning. “I have not yet learned how to do it less.”

“Great,” I said. “Cool. No pressure.”

I put the kettle on, mostly so my hands had a job, and I turned my back on him to do it, which felt braver than it was, given that he could apparently redraw the room from memory whether he was looking at it or not.

“So here's how this works.” I stayed facing the kettle. “It's a formality. The match is declined. It stays declined, that part is not up for negotiation. I want to be really clear about that.”

“Understood,” he said.

“The orientation window is a courtesy to an arriving visitor. It does not reopen a declined match. You can end it early; I can end a session. We keep the paperwork separate from whatever either of us wants.”

“You wrote the protocol.” It was definitely a statement, which is probably how he found me now that I thought of it. If I hadn't been the liaison officer, then he would have just showed up to whoever that was.

“I wrote a lot of it.” I got two mugs down, the good ones, then put one back and took the chipped one instead, because some petty part of me didn't want to hand the big sexy alien who I'd already declined my nice mug. “One month. We meet as officer and alien applicant. I run you through first-contact orientation, Earth customs, off-world logistics, the disclosure packet, all of it, by the book. You ask your questions. I answer them.”

“And then?”

“And then the month is up, you go back to your systems, I go back to my binders.” The kettle started its slow climb toward boiling. I kept my back to him. “And this becomes a strange thing that happened to me once. That I tell absolutely nobody.”

Behind me, nothing. No agreement, no argument, just that total attention prickling the back of my neck. I turned around, curious as to what he was thinking.

“Yes,” he said to all of it. Easy as breathing.

And I stood there holding two mugs and tried to take in what the next month would be like.

“Milk?” I said.

“I don't know. I've never had it.”

“We'll find out, then.” And I heard it a half-second too late. There was no we. It was just him and me. Separately.

He didn't catch it. He was busy trying to change colors, helplessly blue at the knuckles.

I busied myself with the kettle and teacups so I didn't have to watch him do it, and I thought: Okay. One month. You are a professional. You have handled harder things until you could ship them off. This will be the same. No falling for the hunky alien.

I didn't, at that point, know a single thing about how badly I was lying to myself. Give me credit. I'm consistent. I'd been doing it since 8:42 four days ago. But the water came to a boil, and I made tea for the hunkiest alien I'd ever seen. I made one teacup with milk and one without.

“It's hot,” I told him, handing over the chipped mug. “Don't inhale it. And for the record, the document you read? The intake philosophy?” I made myself meet his eyes, which were doing an alarming amount of things to my nervous system. “I meant every word of it.”

“I know,” he stated matter of factly as he sniffed at the mug of tea. “That is why I came.”