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I squinted at the screen. “Dude, is that Hitler? You’re laughing at theHolocaust?”
He was laughing so hard he couldn’t even answer me properly. “The tiny man—he is soangry!” I snatched the remote from Q’on and quickly changed the channel, landing on a quote-unquote reality game show.
“Here. Watch this instead. A human mating game. See, these women are all competing for this one guy’s attention. He’ll go on dates with all of them, and as the show goes on, he eliminates the ones he doesn’t want to date.”
“He eliminates them? It is a hunting game, then. A sport.”
Oops. Bad choice of words. “He doesn’t kill them. Just … sends them home. The ones who stay get to try again next week. Once there’s only one girl left, that’s who he dates.”
“Dates?”
Oh geez. The nanites must be slow. “Mates with.”
He sat up and leaned forward, rapt. “This is a human mating tutorial?”
“Not quite. It’s just a game. The whole thing is probably scripted, but it’s not real, anyway. It’s just for entertainment.”
Q’on turned to me with one brow raised. The look was comical, but I bit my tongue to keep from laughing at him. “Humans mate for entertainment?”
“Well—sometimes? I mean, there’s quite the porn industry, so I guess that’s not totally untrue. But under normal circumstances, no. We don’t date for entertainment. We do it for companionship. Sometimes love, if you still believe in that.”
This time he frowned. “You do not believe in love?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been burned by it in the past. I’m skeptical at best when it comes to love.”
Q’on toyed with the fringe on a throw pillow as he processed my words. After a long pause, he looked back at me. I couldn’t quite place the expression on his face—something of a mix between pity and sadness, with a bit of determination thrown in. “Your word: love. It saddens me that you do not believe in it, now that I understand the meaning. I believe in love. I loved Mili’ana. We would have been good mates.” He held the pillow up as if it was a kid, almost cradling it. “We would have made good babies. Strong babies. We would have loved them.”
I thought about my own age and infertility. Ryan was partly to blame, but my body chemistry had something to do with it, too. Even if I wanted to play mating games with Q’on, there was no chance for the strong babies he was talking about. I was just about dried up. “Not everyone’s made for babies. Some people can’t. Humans, at least. I don’t know about Xalanites.”
He frowned. “Your voice is sad. Can you not have babies?”
Damnit! This was not the direction I wanted our conversation to go. “Look, let’s just find something else to watch. This talk of love and babies is depressing.”
I guess it was Q’on’s turn to steal the remote. “No. I want to watch the mating game.”
“Come on, man!” I sank back into the sofa and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not in the mood for this shit. Just forget I even landed on this channel.”
He turned away from me and set the remote out of my reach. “I wish to learn human mating. I wish to watch this.”
“You’re not going to learn anything real from this. I told you; it’s scripted. It’s all fake.”
If I hadn’t known any better, I'd swear he was ignoring me. His jaw set, and he stared pointedly at the screen.
I sighed and stood up. Even though it was early, I wanted nothing more than to hit the sack—after changing the dirty sheets, of course. “Well, I'm going to bed. You can sleep on the couch here if you want to stay. I could get you a blanket.” I couldn’t believe I was offering to let an alien crash on my couch. What was wrong with me?
Q’on echoed my sigh. “I should check on my ship. See what I can salvage.”
“Your ship is at the bottom of Lake Ontario! How are you going to check it out?”
He shrugged. “The water is not an obstacle for me. Xalan is ninety percent liquid. My people can breathe in it like air.”
“Oh. Well … Good night, then, I guess. Lock up when you’re done. You know how to lock the doors, right?” I shook my head. Of course he didn’t. Doors on his planet probably locked themselves unless the right bioscan came into contact with them or something equally flashy. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”
His hand landed on my arm, and I froze. He wasn’t rough about it—his touch was gentle—but something about the way his fingers slid up my arm to curl around my bicep, the way his lips parted as he followed the trail of his hand with his eyes …
“Yes?” I said, breathless.
“Do not concern yourself with locks,” he said, eyes still zeroed in on where his hand met my arm. “I will protect you. I am mighty. No one will harm you so long as I am near.”
