Chapter 10
I had forgotten how good eggs smelled in the morning. It’s wonderful stuff. Granted, they’re temperamental, and getting them to that state of goodness takes a bit of commitment. You forget those shells, dank odor, and goopy consistency once they touch a hot pan and caress your nose with a full, buttery aroma. I haven’t prepared a decent breakfast in a good while.
My cooking stirred Basil from his roost and he stumbled, eyes half-open, into the kitchen to investigate. Something to boggle the mind: I actually woke up earlier than an Isian for a change—and on my vacation no less. So out of touch I was with vacation time, I didn’t remember how to sleep in for the day. On the bright side, it’s one of those rare times where the smell of breakfast didn’t make me want to retch dinner back up.
Basil’s eyes fluttered open and his nostrils flared. He leaned over the stove and sniffed in the steam from the frying eggs. “What’s that?”
“Eggs for breakfast. Want some?”
“Sure!”
The egg carton on the counter caught his eye, and he plucked one out and dropped it in his mouth. He winced and bit into the egg until it broke with a dull crack. He gulped the whole thing down at once. “Yummy!”
“I was thinking more like this,” I said. I folded in a mix of ham, peppers, and cheese into the solidifying egg. “It’s an omelette. I’ll make you one too, if you want.”
Basil studied the concoction. “Huh, well. I don’t know if I want any, actually.”
“It’s good. Here, have a bite.”
I broke off a small cooked piece from the corner and offered it on my spatula. He pinched the piece with his fingers and, after holding it for a moments study, slurped it into his mouth. His face twisted in concentration as he chewed and gauged its worth.
“Well, how is it?” I asked.
He swallowed the bit and shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. But you can have it.” He looked over to the whole eggs. “Can I have some more normal ones, though?”
I nodded, and he scooped up an egg in each hand and bounded to the living room. I slid my omelette onto a plate and followed. I sat next to him on the couch with my legs stretched over the coffee table and plate balanced on my lap. Basil, obviously a master of leisure time efficiency, had already opened a new episode of a children’s cartoon, Captain Starslinger and the Galactic Empire. The show’s fascinating stuff, though I always wondered if the noble and fearless captain would ever find the Lost Ark of the Bai’Satheeik. Maybe he was always doomed to failure, for finding it would allow peace and prosperity to reign throughout the galaxy, and we couldn’t possibly have that. Peace doesn’t sell merchandise.
Ah, the simple joys of eating eggs and watching kids’ shows in your underwear. Those bastards at my company owed me that much, I figured. I ruffled Basil’s neck as the show mesmerized him into a slow chew of his egg. My only regret was that Tia wasn’t here to share the good times. I wolfed down my omelette. I’ll have to make it up to her sometime.
Starslinger’s chase after the nefarious Alien Warlord ended with (another) cliffhanger when a space beast swallowed his galactic warship and doomed him to dissolve in a pit of digestive acids. The break allowed Basil to blink and swallow.
“You think he will ever rescue the Princess from the Alien Warlord?” he asked me.
“Sure, the good guys always win in these shows.”
“Yeah, I think so. They always make it look like he might lose and keep you guessing. That’s why we like this show.”
“You watch this with Tia all the time?”
“Nah, she doesn’t care about it. I watch with all the guys when I was at Wyvern. Rho’s the biggest Starslinger fan ever. He even has all the action figures and stuff. Once, Kappa hid one of his dolls and he tore through everything in the barracks to try get it back. Zeta and Eta later found it for him though.”
When you hear an odd name, you might have to take a moment to understand what you just heard. I took a good while to make sense of Basil’s series of college fraternities jacked into a blender.
“Say Basil, who are these people you’re talking about, anyway?”
“The guys? They’re my brothers.”
Brothers? All this time, I thought Tia was his only sibling. “How come you never told me you had other brothers? You only talk about your sister.”
“That’s because they’re not really my brothers. That’s just what Ushi calls us. He says that we’re all brothers, even though we’re not, and we have to love each other and keep together and everything. Does that make sense to you?”
“It does, actually.”
“Oh good, because it never made sense to me. Maybe you can explain it to me sometime.” He scooped his second egg into his mouth and crunched it apart. “Anyway, yeah. My brothers-but-not-really-brothers. They’re pretty awesome. I miss them sometimes.”
Geez, what names! The folks at Wyvern must have been committed to obsession with their naming concepts. I finished the last bite of my breakfast and wiped my mouth with the hem of my t-shirt. I poked Basil for more information about his brethren.
“So, how many Isians are there at Wyvern, anyway?”
“At Wyvern? I dunno. Wyvern has a lot of places everywhere. But at our old home, there were eleven of us. Well, nine since we left.”
“Really? That many?”
“Yeah. There was me, Sis, Kappa, Rho, Zeta, Eta, Gimel, Nu, Aleph, Ushi, and Kidna,” he said, counting each individual with his six fingers and continuing on his toes after running out of digits. “So, eleven. There were a couple more, but they left after a while.”
“Wow, that sounds like a big happy family.”
“Sometimes we are. Other times, everyone just fights with each other. I’m glad Tia isn’t with the guys. I really don’t like it when they hang around with her by themselves.”
I went to dump my plate in the sink. On the way, I noticed a knapsack on the kitchen table. So long since the twins had made use of them, the sacks blended into my apartment’s decor, and it was only after Tia was gone that my eyes took interest to this one. I tugged the bag back to the living room after setting the plate away.
“This isn’t yours, right?” I asked Basil to confirm.
“Nope,” he said after a casual glance away from his show. “It’s Tia’s. She must of left it behind.”
“All right. I’ll just put it away then.”
I moved to stow it away, but he whistled for attention.
“You didn’t open it did you?”
“No. Why?”
“Tia’s special stone in there. You don’t want to mess with her special stone.”
“Special stone?”
“Yeah. It’s her most favorite thing ever in the world. She loves it so much. Too much, I think. One time, I took it just to see what it was like. But I accidentally dropped it and it got lost in a gutter. She got so angry that she bit off a piece of my tail. See? Here look.”
He laid himself on his side on the couch, exposing the underside of his tail, and waved me in for a closer look. Near the base of the tail, he rubbed a spot that, under closer inspection, was actually a shallow depression where you would expect flesh to be. Coarse-looking teeth marks scarred the area like something had bitten a chunk of his tail clean off. I groaned and swallowed at the thought of the horrific agony I imagined must have followed.
“Did that… hurt?” I stammered.
“Oh yeah. There was so much blood, and it hurt so bad I couldn’t walk for three weeks.”
I clutched my abdomen and shared his pain. “That sounds terrible, Basil.”
He shook his head. “It was actually pretty cool. Because she felt so bad about it, she took care of me until I got all better. She made me blankets, gave me baths and massages, she even fed me all her food.” He licked his lips with a wistful expression. “I wish she would bite my tail again. I love it when she takes care of me.”
“Well, I’m glad you got better.”
“Eh, I thought I got better too fast. One or two more weeks would’ve been good. But anyway, she eventually found it and wouldn’t let me go near it again. Not that I ever wanted to, anyway.”
“What kind of stone is this that would make her do that to you, anyway?”
“Well, it’s pretty, I guess. That’s about it. You know how girls are, they see something pretty and they become crazy and stuff. She really loves it. I think she loves it more than me. She doesn’t show it to anyone unless she really, really, really likes them. Really.” He bit his tongue and intoned the last “really” as a slur. “Anyway, I never tried to touch or even look at it again. And you shouldn’t either, or else she might bite off your tail.”
I nodded in understanding and placed the bag in the living room’s corner closet, the one with a working lock. I could only imagine what sort of magnificent gem it must have contained for Tia to maim her own brother. Basil’s mutilated tail reminded me never to find myself on the bad side of these creatures, just in case I had forgotten.
After the last show ended, we spent the remainder of the morning as good, healthy adult men should: happily conked out in the living room—me lounging on the sofa in my underwear and Basil occupying himself with snores on the carpet. Away from the bustle and artificial responsibilities of civilization, this was the natural environment for the common male. I would have loved it forever if the door chime hadn’t pulled me away from the slice of heaven on the couch that I’d carved with my ass.
I prepared to tell off my landlord again as I drug myself to the door and opened it without bothering to check the visitor’s camera. Instead, a lanky, blue-on-white striped robot greeted me. It wore an emblem of a stylized bald eagle on its right breast over a lengthy serial number. The bot held a manila envelope in its spindly blue hands and presented it to me.
“Registered mail for Ms. Cusaris,” the bot said in a scratchy androgynous voice.
“Ms. Cusaris?” I repeated, still a bit groggy from the nap. “I think I have the wrong place, there’s no Cusaris here.”
“This is the correct address, sir. I have mail for one Ms. Cusaris.”
“Did you say Cusaris?” I heard a voice say. Basil shuffled up behind me and peeked out the door. “Are you talking about Tia?”
“I have mail addressed to Ms. Tiamat Cusaris,” it clarified.
The envelope vanished from sight and left the postal robot holding air and looking at me in a state of mechanical confusion. I gave it a few seconds for to process itself, signed for the mail, and let it go on its way. Back inside, Basil was holding the envelope up in the air and squinting his eyes to study it.
“It’s from the zoo,” he said.
“Yeah? What did they send her?”
“I don’t know.” He sniffed the package and frowned. It gave me an uneasy tingling.
“Here, let me keep it for her until she gets back,” I said and offered my hand.
He shook his head and clutched the package to his chest.
“No, no. I’ll do it.”
“You sure? I could put in a safe place.”
He thumped his tail and clicked his tongue, and a broken scowl crawled onto his face. “I said I’ll do it.”
I took a cautious step back when a low growl rumbled from his throat. With the yellow paper envelope crinkling underneath his claws, the Isian gripped his sister’s package with an all-too-familiar antipathy I had hoped I would never have to see again. I had a feeling my vacation was over.
I had put on my work shirts and pants for the afternoon. It’s not like I had anything else to wear, and I felt there was no point left in casual clothing. I resigned myself to my computer and studied the new shipment of power regulators Secondary was supposed to trial in three weeks. You know, stuff I would’ve done had I gone to work for the day. I loved vacation time.
Basil sat on the kitchen table with the envelope lying in front of him. I couldn’t coax him out no matter how much I tried. He stared at the mail for the past several hours like a statue, occasionally rousing to life to scratch the yellow paper with quiet indignation. He didn’t even notice the steaks I grilled for dinner.
“Hey, little guy, want some t-bone?” I asked. “It big and juicy, just for you.”
Silence.
“How about some cantaloupe? We can go to the store and you can pick a couple for yourself.”
Nothing.
“Do want to talk to me about anything?”
Nil. I wished Tia was here to try to make sense of her brother. And to give me someone to talk to.
“All right, I’ll just leave this here for you,” I said, placing the plate of meat beside him. He continued staring at the envelope without a flinch. I sighed and left him to simmer. The apartment felt quiet—the mood seemed to soak the sirens and racket of the outside’s natural ambiance. I went back to the computer to work and eventually zoned out until I fell asleep on the couch.
It was about seven in the evening when a banging on the window stirred me up. I rubbed my eyes open and saw Basil still mulling over the envelope. The window banged again, a more insistent knock that warped the plastic panel. Curious, I got up and opened the window. A ferocious gust crushed me back, and I found myself staring at the ceiling. I bent my head down, confused, and found something on my chest. It stared back at me with blue eyes and a clicking jaw.
“You can stop missing me now, Ly-lee,” it said.
“Wha—? Tia?” I managed to gasp after struggling the breath back into my lungs.
She nodded, clicked her tongue, and placed her arms on my chest to snuggle herself along my body. She reached her snout to my nose and flicked it with her tongue. “Well, you still look healthy and handsome. I guess I wasn’t gone that long, yeah?”
“Why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be at Wyvern?”
“Silly, didn’t you get my message? I said I’d be here tonight.”
I shook my head.
She tapped my nose with a finger. “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I’m here now. Did you miss me?”
“Yes, I missed you,” I said. It surprised me how refreshing it was to say.
She licked me again and smiled. Looking at those crinkled lizard lips, I couldn’t help but to smile back. I couldn’t hold it long, though, since the pressure on my chest became unbearable. I took Tia’s sides and tried to wheedle her off of my chest. “Hey, you mind letting me get back up?” I asked when she wouldn’t budge. She just pressed down harder.
“But it feels pretty comfortable here, don’t you think?”
“Come on, Tia.”
She was half my weight but many times my strength, and easily used the muscle to bolt my shoulder to floor with her claws. I continued to struggle, which only coaxed her to press harder and give me a winning smile that said she wasn’t budging. After I struggled a bit more, she finally let me go and flopped off my body. She lay on her side on the floor and looked at me with mischievous eyes as if nothing had happened.
One of her ears perked up when something stirred behind us. We both turned our attention to it and found Basil gaping at us, the envelope clutched to his chest.
“Oh, hey little brother,” Tia said.
“What are you doing here?” Basil asked.
“What do you think? I’m came back home, silly.”
“But it’s only been two days. You’re still—”
“I’m still fine. I got checked up and everything. Besides, how can stay away from my dear brother and Ly-lee?” She got up and leaned down to sniff the envelope. “Whatya got there, anyway?”
Basil yelped and quickly hid the package behind him. “Oh nothing. Nothing important.”
“Yeah? Lemme see.” She juked back and forth around Basil as he tried to block her from the envelope. “Looks like mail. Who’s it from?”
“Nobody. Nobody important.”
She frowned at him and thumped her tail on the floor. She clicked and chirped, and she said something to him in the Isian tongue. Basil took a few steps back and shook his head. Tia sighed and crossed her arms. Against my better judgment, I decided to intervene.
“It’s for you, Tia. The zoo sent it.”
Her eyes ignited like baked matchsticks, and she she sprung at Basil with a high-pitched shrill. Basil yelped in surprise when she pinned him down, his breath escaping in an “oof!” when his chest thumped against to the floor. Tia restrained him, sitting on his back and twisting his arms behind his body, and then snatched the envelope from his claws. She held it in front of herself and squealed.
“Oh, it’s here!” she cried.
She tore an end off the envelope with her mouth and shook out a single glossy sheet onto her hand. She squealed again and tossed away the envelope so she could hold the sheet up with both claws. I circled around to take a look at it. It was a photograph of a komodo dragon with its keeper off to the side. Judging by Tia’s reaction, it must have been Sydney from the city zoo.
Tia held the picture up for me. “Look, look!” she said, pointing erratically at the picture. “Isn’t this a lovely picture? Oh, look at him! Isn’t he so handsome? He looks so strong and powerful, and look at his beautiful dark skin! Look, I think there’s something written on the back. ‘Dear Tia, I hope you’re having a good time at Tetra. You’re always welcome back to the here anytime. Yours truly, the Hamilton-Wyvern World Zoo,’ Oh, how nice!”
Basil didn’t look amused as he lay under his sister.
A long and unrestrained giggle escaped Tia. She finally got off her brother and, with the photo held out like a dance partner, circled across the carpet on the tips of her toes. “He likes me! He likes me!” she repeated as she pirouetted, stopping only after her back struck the apartment door with a thud. She slid down to her rump with the photo snuggled to her chest, then sighed.
Basil arched his back and then inched back onto his feet. He eyed Tia and then thumped his tail on the floor. He clicked his tongue sharply, seeming like he wanted to attract her attention, but she ignored him. He crossed his arms, looked at me, and frowned.
The Isian wasn’t frowning at me, but with me.
I began to understand his thoughts and motivation, and after watching his sister hold onto that photograph like a treasured heirloom, I found myself agreeing with him. He appealed to me with a flick of his head toward Tia. I nodded and, hand held out, went to her.
“Fun’s over now, Tia. Let’s hand that over to me.”
The command snapped her out of her reverie. She questioned me by pointing to the photograph.
“Yes, that,” I said. “Give it to me.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to keep it for you.”
“But it’s mine. I want to keep it.”
“That thing has been causing trouble all morning ever since it got here, okay? See how unhappy your brother is?”
She shook her head. “No, no, no. He’s just being mean again. I didn’t do anything to him and neither did this picture. Please don’t take it from me.”
“I’m not going to ask you again. If we’re going to live with each other then we’re all going to have to get along with each other. Give it to me.”
I brought my hand closer to her. She looked at it, then at the photo, and back to my hand. She sighed and placed the photo on my palm without further complaint. I heard her snort her disagreement behind me when I picked up the discarded mailer and slipped the photo back into it.
Basil gave her a big victorious smirk and clapped his hands together. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” he said.
“I only did it because Ly-lee asked me to,” Tia said. She stuck her tongue at him. “And only because you made him. Now both of you owe me free time to watch whatever I want.”
She jumped on the couch and started queuing up a series of programs.
“But a new Iron Maiden came out and I want to watch it!” Basil whined.
“Nope. Mine!”
While the twins were busy hashing out the rights to the media player, I went to my room and closed the door. The envelope showed a bright yellow when I turned on the lights, which allowed the black text of the zoo’s address to contrast like ominous monoliths. An imprint of Bazaar the Bear kissed the ripped edge at a corner. I rubbed it a bit. After I slid out photograph out, I tossed it away and doomed it to live underneath my bed among years of other junk. I sat on the bed and just stared at the picture in my hands. The dragon looked back at me with that obtuse and stolid gaze only reptiles can give. Proud. Strong. Without a care in the world. Even when reduced to a lifeless image, the dragon enraptured with its presence. I pulled open the nightstand drawer and stowed the photo underneath the bottle of sleeping pills. Maybe, in there, I would forget it.
The reboot for my vacation (new and improved with both twins) started with another ham and cheese breakfast omelette for me and some raw breakfast eggs for the twins. They divided the eggs equitably among themselves—equality, in this case, meaning Basil got his fair pair while Tia claimed the rest of the carton. She was snacking on them like popcorn and hoarded over the morning playlist with dozens of children’s educational shows.
“Can’t we watch just one episode of Starslinger, Sis?” Basil begged after five minutes of enduring a malformed hand puppet singing the alphabet.
“Nope. My shows now,” Tia said in between crunchy mouthfuls. She clutched the controls to her belly and plopped on top of it.
Basil tried to solicit help from me with a pitiful lost-dog look, but I just shrugged at him. He resigned to his seat and drew out his chews on his last egg. He didn’t seem crushed though, and even bobbed his head to the song involving the number of toes one has. (Surprisingly, it was ten.)
I finished my omelette, and when a stuffed emu started talking about the importance of eating a well-balanced breakfast, I figured it was an opportune time to retire my plate. When I got to the sink and started washing the plate and fork, I felt a pair of fingertips tickle my ears. A grinning Tia greeted me when I turned around.
“Hi there, tall one,” she said.
“Hey. We’re out of eggs, if you’re looking for any.”
She rubbed her belly. “Oh no, I’m stuffed. I came to talk to you.”
“Oh? What about?”
Her mouthed opened and she started to speak, but she choked her words out before they could form. She clacked her claws to the floor and seemed like she was trying to think of what she wanted to say.
“I need to ask you for a favor, Ly-lee,” she finally said.
“What about?”
“Well, you see…” she started, then scratched her ear.
Basil interrupted with a shout from the living room. “Hey Tia, can I have one of your eggs?”
“Umm…”
“C’mon, just one? Please?”
“I’ll tell you later, when my brother’s asleep, okay?” Tia said to me and hurried out the kitchen.
Her coyness left me confused, and I honestly didn’t know if I wanted to hear the favor she wanted from me, but it was unthinkable for me not to consider it. Whatever it was. I dunked my plate along with its soiled cousins from the days past and left the kitchen before Tia’s eggs could sprout wings and start flying across my living room.
Tia’s program queue, a catalog that broke through the software’s hardcoded playlist limit (“Kappa showed me a neat trick with this,” she said as she cheerfully voided all sorts of warranties with a hacking tool), exhausted us before long. Not even through half of the list, Tia was already snoring on the couch with the controls cradled in her arms and her ears twitching to guard it. Basil amused himself by roosting on the windowsill and doing his best feline impression. Occasionally, he would lock eyes with an actual cat from the opposite building, and he would stiffen his tail and lick his lips. Some instincts just die too hard.
Meanwhile, I tried to break the global leaderboards for “Ultra Deathball 3 DX Plus” on Basil’s tablet. Every time I thought I reached new levels in my mastery of the eponymous sphere, some asshole in Uzbekistan comes in and crushes my virgin score in an orgy of glistening balls. I exhausted five hours trying to rub the smug off the fat fucking face of “SlvDethdk8” before I gave up. I wasn’t properly trained to operate computers for anything other than work, and I had to retire back to the couch with my hands deformed into man-claws that were useless for anything except scratching Tia’s neck.
For dinner, I grilled some steak, cuts I had bought a couple of days before that I didn’t bother to marinate. Wasted effort to do so, really. Just rip off a few slabs, slap them onto a skillet, and burn. That was good enough for Isian tastes. It didn’t take long for the primitive aroma of searing flesh to rouse the twins from their respective daydreams. We ate in the living room, Tia and me on the couch and Basil lying on the floor, and enjoyed the night’s entertainment from the massive playlist. It had advanced to a nature documentary.
“Oh, I must have added the wrong one,” Tia said. “This is the lion episode, not the dolphin one.”
“No, no, keep it here,” said Basil before she could skip it.
“Why? Didn’t you already watch this with the guys.”
“I fell asleep because I drank one of Zeta’s stupid experiments, remember? C’mon, Tia. Ly-lee hasn’t seen it either, right?”
Tia turned to me in silent questioning, and I shook my head. She shrugged and took a chunk out from her steak. “Okay. I kinda like lions, anyway.”
The presentation was your bog-standard animal show with your bog-standard animal, yet there’s something about lions that stirred the primal part of the imagination. The narrator described the behaviors of a male lion and his pride in a high-class British accent, which transformed even the most basal of instincts into something that would be home in a galleria somewhere. The particular specimen spotlighted lorded over a group of 25 lionesses, many more than his rivals. And unfortunately, nature documentaries seemed to take pride in depicting the instinctual duties of males with uncomfortable candidness.
“Now that the breeding season as begun, the male lion begins to court the lionesses as they become sexually receptive. Despite being the head lion of the pride, he must still coax them if they are to allow him to mate,” the narrator stated with the intensity of describing breeding housecats.
Christ, with the frequency these shows insist on showing the act, you’d figure their directors must have been veterans of the porn industry who left for more legitimate pursuits. Old fucking habits don’t die easily. I didn’t care for lion porn, to be honest. I could only hope the either glosses over the actual act of carnality or a sassy and independent lioness bats the male in the face. A case of feline erectile dysfunction would also be acceptable. I crossed my fingers.
“The lioness lays down and submits to his advances, and the male can finally mate with her…”
Oh goddammit. The camera zoomed in to the quivering rumps of the mounted pair, and I turned away. Fucking nature documentary directors. Motherfucking perverts, the whole lot of them.
Truth to tell, had I been the only one watching, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash because I was a grown-fucking-man, and animals doing the nasty hadn’t squicked me since I learned how not to piss all over the bathroom floor. But, consider this: You always hear stories of you Uncle Ned and how he keeps two tons of pornography in his basement, right? The relative who’s a hardcore purveyor of porn, a connoisseur of cooch, a sultan of smut, and a King of Kink? He has more creampies than a Boston bakery and could tell you the exact timestamp where Eva Alexander made that world record–breaking two meter squirt on Extreme Explosive Anal Sluts 13. The man that is the stuff of legend.
And yet, every time he babysits you and some family movie comes on, sweaty beads drips from his forehead when the two leads give each other pecks on the cheeks, which always ends with him shutting everything off and suggesting a field trip to the local amusement park the next state over.
Yeah, it’s sort of like that.
“Hey guys, let’s watch another show, huh?” I said.
“Nah,” they said.
Jesus, the lions looked like they were causing an earthquake all the way to Monaco. I shielded the side of my face with my hand. An even more terrifying sight glazed over my eye: Tia staring intently at the screen, steak suspended midair in her hands, and her eyes unblinking to catch every single frame. A grumble churned in my chest that refused to die with empty swallow.
Oh God.
Oh God!
I wasn’t ready for that, not the talk! I wouldn’t even know where to begin. They’re lizards! Breathe, Lyle! You’re an engineer. They’re engineers. This is just an engineering concept. A bolt screws into a nut, a male plug fits into a female receptacle, a round peg goes into a square hole. No, wait…
My unrest only grew when Tia twisted her head to the side, squinted her eyes, and blurted, “Huh.”
I choked in my breath prepared myself for the first words of a long talk. I opened my mouth. You see guys, when a man really, really loves a woman…
Tia released her steak to the plate on the table and pointed to the screen. “He’s doing it all wrong,” she said.
I slapped my jaw shut with a hand and covered my mouth with the other. Are you fucking serious?
Basil rotated his head along the floor to take a better look at the humping lions, and then asked, “What’s wrong with it?”
“Look at him! He’s going too fast and rough. That doesn’t look like fun at all.”
“Looks fine to me. He seems pretty happy about it.”
“Well of course he does. But look at the girl, she doesn’t look like she’s having a good time at all. And look, he’s already off!”
“That’s because he’s done, what else do you think?”
“He’s done way too fast. That wasn’t even ten seconds!”
“You’re just being picky. Way too picky.”
She snorted and tapped my knee, something I hoped she wouldn’t do. “Hey Ly-lee, you agree with me, right? The male lion did it all wrong, didn’t he?”
I gulped my mouthful and scrambled to think of what to say, but ended up stuttering out bullshit. “Tia, I don’t really… I can’t really say. I mean, it’s a bit, you know… relative.”
“How about the lion? You agree he did it way too fast, right?”
“Well, I—”
Basil bent his head around and interrupted. “He did it fine, like I said. Why are you picking on him?”
Tia snorted at him, shook her head, and went back to me. She placed her hands on my shoulders and moved her snout close to my nose. I felt her breath brush along my face and, given the current discourse, felt more than a bit uncomfortable. She went shot point-blank with her question: “How long do you usually take when you mate, Ly-lee?”
My lungs froze. I slammed my fist into my chest to resuscitate them.
“Probably the same amount of time, what do you think?” said Basil. “It’s enough for everybody.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Tia said to her brother. She clicked her tongue and then tapped my nose. “I asked you. Well? How do you do it with your twenty girls?”
The conversation numbed my tongue. On one hand, the question was intensely personal and I didn’t want any part of it. On the other,did Basil really insinuate I took ten seconds to have sex? Dammit, even I* couldn’t leave that well alone.
“Well,” I said, “it’s different with everyone really. I mean, how long I take isn’t the right one for everyone else, you know? Everyone has different standards.”
“What about your standards, then?”
“I, uh…” Goddamn, fuck me. “Well, I guess… I’m just not the best guy to ask about this, Tia.”
“Why not?”
“I’m kind of weird and not normal. Yeah, that’s bad data. You can’t use bad data, right?”
“That doesn’t matter. There are only two guys in this room, and you having bad data is better than him having no data,” she said with a point toward Basil.
A thunk shook the room when Basil slammed his tail to the floor, which knocked Tia’s steak shook off table. He sat upright and glared at us. Tia returned with a frown of annoyance.
“Hey, that was my food!” she cried.
Basil opened his mouth to retort but only his tongue lopped out, which he slipped back in and rasped instead. He flicked his tail behind him to turn off the screen and said in a low and deliberate tone, “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep. And maybe you should too. You must be so tired from all the exercise you do with your mouth.”
He left to the bathroom, not seeing the tongue his sister gave him behind his back.
After the bathroom door shut, Tia grabbed my shoulders and jumped onto my lap. The sudden movement made me grab her waist in reflex. She smiled and pressed her snout to my head when I shook my hands off at the realization.
“Well, he’s finally gone,” she said. “Now we can finally talk by ourselves.”
I shook my head. “We’re not going to talk about lions anymore, are we?”
“Lions? Oh, forget about the lions. Basil never listens and we both know that I’m right anyway. I have something way more important to talk about.”
I almost dreaded asking.
“What of?”
“About the f—” Her breath broke in mid-phrase. She took each of my hands, clasped them between her claws, and held them up between our faces. A shy countenance hid behind those tangled digits. She took a hesitant breath and started again. “You know that I trust you with everything, right Ly-lee? I really do. You’ve done everything for me and my brother. You know that, right?”
“Well, thanks Tia,” I said, stupefied by the sudden declaration.
“And you trust me too, right? That I wouldn’t hurt you, my brother, and everyone else?”
A pause. What was she getting at? I jostled upright on the seat, and she swayed back to keep her head behind our hands. I wasn’t sure what I really wanted to answer her question with, but I felt there was only one satisfactory reply.
“Yes I do, Tia. I trust you.”
Her eyes beamed wide and her frill splayed open in excitement. She clicked excitedly and gripped my hands tighter. “Oh good! We trust each other then? That makes things much easier. I need you to do me a small favor, Ly-lee.”
A familiar discomfort wormed its way back into my consciousness, something I tried my damndest to root out when I nodded. The useless effort only served to feed it, especially when she started to speak again.
“You know the new park that just opened about a week ago? The one next to the train station. Allester Park, I think it’s called?” She waited, and I shrugged for her to continue. “Well, do you think you can take Basil there for a day? Maybe tomorrow?”
“You want me take you guys to the park?” I chuckled in relief. “Geez, Tia. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, I’ll take you guys, no problem. You should have just asked earlier.”
She bobbed our hands and shook her head. “No, no. Not us. Just Basil. I need you to take my brother there. Just you and him.”
The feeling stabbed me again, probably gloating on how naive I must be to think it was that easy. It sharpened my voice when I asked her why.
“Well I need to go… somewhere,” she replied. “Somewhere without him.”
“Where?”
She hesitated. “The zoo. I need to go to the zoo. There’s someone there I need to see.”
“Why can’t we go together?”
“I have to go by myself. I can’t go with you or especially not Basil. He’d go crazy.”
“Why do you need to go to the zoo? Why the zoo? Who are you going to see? Why are you going to see them?” I asked in quick and agitated succession. They were almost rhetorical—I was sure I already knew the answers.
“I… I can’t tell you.”
She yelped in surprise when I broke my hands from her claws.
“If you can’t tell me then I can’t help you,” I said. “This is a bad idea, and I won’t allow it.”
“But you said you trusted me.”
“I can’t trust you if you’re not going to tell me anything. Especially not with the zoo.”
“Ly-lee…”
“No!”
She drooped her head down and wrapped her hands over mine again. She pleaded with them by rocking them up and down. Lost in a deep breath, she placed the tip of her fingers on my chest, brushed the nail against my shirt, and pressed her palm against me. She upturned her head to me, and I had to strain to hear her speak.
“I trust with everything, Ly-lee.” She closed her eyes and pressed firmer onto my chest. “I would do anything for you. Anything you wanted me to. I wouldn’t even ask why because I know you would only look out for me.”
She took my hand, placed it on her chest, and covered it with her other claw. I gasped in surprise as I felt my hand sandwiched between the smooth and warm scales. I felt her heart beat through with a rhythm of a lullaby, and for a few seconds, my hand felt like the best part of my body. We sat, palms on the chest of one another, and she lifted her eyelids open and looked at me with timid, turquoise eyes.
“I want you to trust me, Ly-lee. Just this once. I want you to trust me not to do anything that would hurt you or anyone else. Please.”
Those damned eyes.
“I don’t… I don’t know,” I sputtered. “I just don’t like the idea of you going there by yourself.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ve already thought about it, don’t worry. This is just something I need to do myself.” She knelt to eye level and bent in closer until her reptilian eyes filled my gaze. “Please, Ly-lee. Just this once, and I won’t ask you ever again.”
“Tia…”
I stared into her pleading eyes. Dammit. God-fucking-dammit.
“Just this once,” I said. “But only once.”
The Isian leapt her full weight against me and almost blew me out of the couch. She squeezed me with her powerful arms and planted sloppy licks over my face and neck. “Thank you! Thank you!” she said between excited chirps and whistles. “I knew you’d understand, Ly-lee!”
“Yeah,” I said. I moved my hands to her body to with the intention of cajoling her off, but instead, wrapped them around her and rubbed her smooth back. “No problem, Tia.”
She pulled up and lay on top of my chest. With a happy lick to my chin, she said, “You won’t regret it, Ly-lee. This is going to be good for all of us. I promise. Pretty promise!”
Somehow, I didn’t believe her. Maybe I just didn’t want to.