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“What are you doing?” Tasha gasped.
“Just for a few minutes so I can hear.” Then Nisha’s eyes widened. “Wait! I hear them talking.”
Interest piqued, Tasha asked, “What are they saying?”
Nisha angled her ear up toward the vent. “I can’t quite make it out. Besides, I think they’re speaking another language.”
“See? There’s no point in eavesdropping on them.” She knew she shouldn’t entertain Nisha, but she needed to give her eyes a rest anyway.
“This is purely for research purposes. We need to find out where they’re from, if they’re murderers, how often they hit the weights, what’s their hair routine, if they have any girlfriends, what they do for a living—”
“Those are super intrusive questions. If I wanted to know any of that, I would knock on their door.” A look that Tasha recognized all too well splashed across her best friend’s face. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”
Nisha jumped from the couch and dashed toward the front door. “Oh, yes.”
“Nisha, I’m sure they don’t want two strange women bothering them.” Tasha sat her computer aside and scrambled to her feet in pursuit.
“But we do!”
Pausing, Nisha and Tasha swiveled their gazes toward the vent where the deep andverymasculine voice had come from.
Nisha giggled and slapped her hands together. “See! They want to meet us.”
Tasha could’ve been mistaken, but she was sure that when she groaned, a groan had also come from the vent.
“Come on! Let’s go meet your new neighbors.”
Tasha’s eyes lingered back to her computer. “I still have so much work to—”
Ignoring her protests, Nisha pulled Tasha’s hands to lead her. She was being dragged to the front door before Tasha could finish her sentence.
* * *
“TELL ME EXACTLY WHYyou did that?” With his arms crossed, Solgre braced himself against the bathroom door, watching Kien as he tried to smooth the curls in his hair back.
Even from his seat on the ridiculously small armchair, Phate could tell that it wasn’t working. The abundance of water in the atmosphere was doing something strange to the texture of their hair. What use to be short and smooth, was now too long and too wavy.
“Why did I do what, exactly?” Kien asked. “Invite human women to our apartment to cure the boredom that’s been plaguing us since crash landing on this awful, backward planet?”
Phate sighed and leaned back in his chair. “He has a point, Solgre. We’ve been stuck on this planet for four of their Earth months and stuck inside this apartment since we acquired it, only leaving for essentials. Since we couldn’t send the distress beacon via a jump, we don’t know how long it will take for it to reach Thelli.
“We might as well make the best of this situation and meet the locals. At least, we’ll be able to tell the others how first contact went.”
Solgre scrubbed a hand down his stubbled face. “You, too? I thought you would be on my side with this. We should lay low until we get direction from home.”
“Which we won’t receive for a while. The communicator is still down, there’s too much interference in the atmosphere,” Kien pointed out as he squeezed his way through the bathroom doorway and past a disgruntled Solgre. “We’re scientists. We shouldn’t pass up this opportunity to meet the locals and explore their culture firsthand.”
“It’s like neither of you saw thatArea 51documentary on the television. You know the one where humans found a downed spaceship and proceeded to slice up and dissect the aliens inside,” Solgre protested.
Phate frowned. “Did that actually happen or was it just speculation? The aliens didn’t look real at all.”
Kien raised a finger in the air. “Oh, that happened. What I’ve learned so far from watching the television is that documentaries are real. Reality television shows are real. Sitcoms and movies are fake.”
“And still you invited the neighbors over,” Solgre said with a shake of his head.
Kien’s smile stretched. “Femaleneighbors.”
Solgre slapped a hand over his face. “Great. We’re going to end up in a documentary, dissected for all to see because you’re horny.”
