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He frowned. “Those are not much better.” He carefully pinched a tiny fish and held it up in the air. “These are real.”
I laughed. “This coming from a guy who lives off of food bars pressed into rock-hard rectangles.”
“They are made of real food.”
“Well, you can eat yourreal food. I like my canned pasta, thank you very much. It’s not like I eat it all the time. I know, it’s essentially sugar, but it’s always been my comfort food. It reminds me of my childhood—well, the good part anyway, before Dad left.”
“Your sire left? Why? Did he not return after a battle?”
I blinked, then shook my head. “Battle? As if. No, he left because he was a jerk who never wanted a kid. Mom was gorgeous when she was young, so pretty she got scouted by some modeling agency when she was fifteen.” I looked down at my long, lanky frame. “I got her hair and long legs, but that’s about it. I didn’t get a face that does well on the runway and on magazine covers. Anyway, she only did one season and several photo shoots before she met my dad and got herself knocked up. They had a shotgun wedding.”
“What is that?”
I explained to him what it was, how my father hadn’t wanted to get married but had to anyway. They’d been young. Mom had been only sixteen, and Dad, twenty-one. It was either he married her, or my grandad would go to the police, since she’d clearly been underage when I was conceived.
“It was never ahappyhome, but he tried to make it work until I was twelve. Then, he just left. Threw in the towel and disappeared without a word. He was never cut out to be a parent. Neither of them was.”
The distress on Kan’n’s face had me reaching out to comfort him, despite the fact that I was the one telling the story. He must think even less of humans now. Hell, I lost faith in humanity myself every time I thought about it.
“Anyway, before he left, I was allowed to eat stuff like canned pasta and junk food. But afterward, my mom put me on a strict diet.”
“I do not understand.”
“Well, after having me, Mom never quite got her willowy figure back. It was impossible to look like a teenager again, no matter how hard she tried. She dieted and dieted, but no matter how thin she got, Dad never gave her the love she wanted. She blamed Dad’s leaving on her post-baby body. Even I understood that wasn’t it, and I’d only been a kid. But she was convinced it was because she was fat and ugly and covered in stretch marks.”
Tears welled up in my eyes as I remembered the unspoken part of that. She didn’t have to say it in so many words, but I knew she regretted having me. I was the reason why her body was no longer what it was. It sucked to know that neither of my parents wanted me.
“She became obsessed with keeping me thin and beautiful. She told me her chance was over, and now it was up to me to take up the modeling career she never really had, and that started with dieting. But I’d seen what years of dieting had done to her; she was never happy. She convinced some modeling agency to take me on, but I hated it and refused to go back after the first photoshoot. She asked me what the hell I thought I could do with my life instead, and I said what I thought would piss her off the most.”
“What was that?”
“I told her I wanted to be an engineer.” I laughed, and it came out as a cruel sound. I remembered her simultaneously shocked and disgusted look.
“And waste all this?” she’d replied, gesturing to my body.
“Well,youwasted allthis!” I’d tapped my head.
That was one of the last times she talked to me because I moved in with my grandparents soon afterward. All it took was me telling Granddad that she wasn’t letting me eat enough. Everyone had been happier for it. She got to pretend she was young and child-free again, and I got to focus on making myself into everything she wasn’t.
I never did find the money for an engineering degree, but I managed to get an apprenticeship with a mechanic and found a job at the local body shop. The owner, a friend of the mechanic I’d apprenticed with, had given me a chance, despite the rest of the men who worked there immediately assuming I was nothing but a pretty face. I sure showed them!
During that time, I also developed a healthy interest in computers, and started teaching myself about them, so my skills were more well-rounded. It had sure come in handy when the bugpocalypse hit.
“You are certainly very good with machines.” Kan’n’s face looked so sincere in the light of the dying fire. It was probably as close to an apology as I was going to get from him.
“Thank you. Learning about Xarc’n technology has been fun for me. The Xarc’n military never expected anyone using it would understand it, so they didn’t put in any fail-safes to prevent us from taking it apart and modifying it. It’s an exciting challenge.”
“We are not intended to understand it. Only to fight.”
“I know. But… Don’t you ever wish for something different?”
He was quiet for a long moment before he spoke.
Chapter 16: Kan’n
“I did indeed wish for something different. That’s why I came to Earth.” I’d been one of the hunters eager to meet a female and make her my mate.
I pulled Sam tighter to me, enjoying her closeness and the warmth of her body. We were both warm now, having spent hours inside our velvet-lined cave.
