Page 32 of Alien Peacock
“What kind of job is it?”
I think about it, not willing to tell Maeve everything right now. “It’s a job with a lot of responsibility. But when you do it right, it can make life better for lots of people. I don’t think you have something like it on Earth.”
“Oh.”
For a while, the only sounds in the lounge are the hum and rattle from the engines and the soft creaking of the hull. It’s an old ship, but I think it will hold together. These utility ships are usually solid.
I discreetly look over at Maeve. I can’t stop thinking about what I saw and tasted and enjoyed under that jumpsuit. But now, she looks tired. “Did you check out the cabins?”
She frowns. “There are cabins?”
9
- Maeve-
Arelion pulls aside a heavy, wine-red drape, revealing a door behind it. It slides up, and behind there’s a short hallway.
“A comfortable hauler,” he comments. “There are several cabins, and not just one big room for the crew.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Doesn’t smell that good.”
He opens one door, and the light comes on in that cabin. “I imagine garbage freighters rarely do. This must be the captain’s quarters.”
The cabin is unpleasantly lit in sharp green, and I can’t identify anything like a bed. There’s a big metal contraption by one wall, and it looks most of all like some kind of hellish climbing toy from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“Ah, the captain was a Zrop,” Arelion says. “They sleep on frames like that. It won’t be much use to us, and I advise against looking in the bathroom of this cabin. It might disturb you.”
We close the door and try the next one. “And here lived a Rupu,” Arelion sighs. “They sleep hanging on the wall.”
There is indeed some kind of weird rack mounted on the wall, all black spirals and loops. My brain can’t figure out how any creature would have to look to be able to hang there, so I look away. “And the bathroom here is just as bad, I suppose?”
Arelion closes the door. “Rupus don’t use bathrooms. I once made the mistake of asking why. I recommend you don’t.”
“I won’t. And here?” I open the third door along. Inside is a normal cabin, with normal light and a seemingly normal bunk along one wall. There are shelves on the wall, a regular-looking closet and even some decor that looks kind of feminine to me. “You don’t think an Earth girl lived here?”
“I don’t,” Arelion tells me, opening drawers and checking the room. “A female, maybe. But nobody would set an Earth female to work in a garbage hauler. That would be a crazy waste of the price they’d paid for her. It must have been another species, with a somewhat similar number of arms and legs and heads.”
“Should I check the bathroom here?” I push the door open and stand back, expecting to meet horrors.
“It should be a normal one,” Arelion says and looks out a small porthole.
It is, if any alien bathroom can ever be said to be normal. It works for what I need, anyway, and I return to the cabin feeling refreshingly clean.
Arelion is lying on the bed, hands under his head.
“What’s it like to sleep on those wings?” I ask. “Is it like lying on a mattress?”
“Somewhat,” he drawls. “Come and try it.” He extends one wing beside him. “But go easy on the elbow punches.”
I carefully lie down beside him, gently letting my weight rest on the wing. It’s warm and comfortable, but thick with muscle. His scent is wonderful.
“It’s soft.”
He adjusts the wing, folding it over my front. “That’s better.”
It feels like a hyper intimate act, as if he’s letting me in way past his personal boundaries and accepting me as close to him as it’s possible to get. He’s an alien with violent tendencies and really weird friends, a narcissist who just a little while ago was threatening to kill me. And yet I’ve never felt safer.
We lie still for a while. The only sounds are our breathing and the muted clatter and scraping from the straining engines. I feel my heart rate dropping fast, and my eyelids are getting heavy as I relax into him.