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“But the insignia…”
“Yes, elite bounty hunters sometimes try their luck here. They always fail. It had nothing to do with you. The reason I saved you is you clearly didn’t know what you were doing. You were lost and you were hurt and now it is obvious that you were taken advantage of in too many ways to count.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me. If the ship wasn’t mine, why did she stay and take pot shots at you until I annoyed her?”
“I don’t know. I won’t pretend to understand whatever twisted relationship you had with your ship. But I can tell you that you are as much a bounty hunter as I am a pretty ballerina.”
Well, fuck.
The guy was really convincing. He had all the paperwork.
“I signed things,” I frown, puzzling. “It seemed very official.”
“I’m sure it did. Reginald stops at nothing when it comes to scamming fools out of their coin.”
“I did… I did think it was a little odd I didn’t have to do any testing or anything, but I thought…” I don’t even know what the fuck I was thinking. I was thinking it was the quickest way to leave a miserable life of memories behind. And I was thinking I’d get to bring someone to justice, that there would be some fucking fairness in this universe after all.
“You’re not the first, and you will not be the last,” he says. “Do not feel bad. He has scammed better and brighter than you. He was part of the coup on my planet. Reginald has his fingers in every pie of interstellar chaos.”
“Oh. Right. I won’t feel bad then because I’m stupid so of course I got scammed.”
He looks at me. “I said brighter. Or were you laboring under the delusion you were the universe’s most intelligent creature?”
“Well, no.”
“Don’t look to take offense from my words when I am attempting to comfort you.”
I finish my soup in silence. That seems like the safer option. As I eat, I think about all my many failings, and how things seem to incessantly go from bad to worse, and how apparently absolutely nobody can be trusted. Everybody lies, everybody takes advantage, and I always lose.
“At least I no longer have to worry about the possibility of you blowing yourself up with an ill-advised transport,” he muses. “I might be able to give you some freedom — if you can prove to me that you appreciate it and will not do anything stupid.”
“Well, being a great big flaming idiot, that could be really hard for me,” I say, sarcastically.
“You’re right. It could be,” he deadpans.
I flick remnants of soup at him. Orange spatters land across his blue scales. One narrowly avoids his eye.
There’s a moment of silence in which I am not sure what the consequences of my actions will be, and then he lunges for me. Soup flies. I dive away with a screech. He misses on the first lunge, but catches me on the second, wrapping his arm around my waist and pulling me back toward him.
“Let me go! Let me go, you monster!” I scream at the top of my lungs.
He is laughing, and I am laughing too, even though I do not want to be laughing. He is my sworn enemy, another terrible male I have to suffer with. Men are the worst, with their excessive strength, and their arrogant egos, and their hard fucking cocks throbbing against my sensitive cheeks.
“You are such a bad-tempered little brat,” Manik purrs in my ear. “I thought humans were supposed to be sensible and civilized, but you are wild.”
Wild? Maybe I am. I didn’t used to be wild. I can remember the exact moment I went wild.
Six months ago…
“Dinner will be ready soon; I’m just finishing up this…”
“I’m leaving, Lyssa, and I’m taking the dog.”
The words don’t really compute. Stan and I have been together for six years. We’re supposed to be married in six days. My wedding dress is hung up in the closet, carefully hidden in a dark dress bag because it would be bad luck for him to see it before the wedding day. The kitchen counter is full of little snackitos, and there’s curled ribbon everywhere from the five hundred goodie bags I put together for the guests. A sash with the word ‘whore’ in glittery gold letters sits jauntily over the back of a chair. My friends have foul senses of humor. The house looks like a party threw up all over it, and now the man who told me as recently as last night that he loved me is telling me he’s leaving.
“What? Is this a joke?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I thought I could make this work, but I can’t. You’re just not marriage material.”
