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The handheld communicator device crackled. Phate rolled over from his spot on the pull-out couch and dragged open his heavy eyelids. The incoming yellow light indicated a message was waiting.
Message?
Phate’s groggy brain couldn’t quite process anything through the sleep haze. When the pieces finally clicked together, he bolted upright with a gasp.
“What? What’s going on?” Kien quickly awakened. The mattress they shared dipped as he sat up as well. “What happened? Where’s Solgre?”
Phate didn’t glance toward the only bedroom in the small living space. The light snoring coming from the other room was rhythmic and deep. Solgre was finally getting some much-needed rest.
One of the side effects of the disease was a disruption in the sleep/wake cycle. Solgre staying up all hours of the night should’ve been a dead giveaway he was ill, but Phate had assumed it was frustration for being stranded on Earth and determination to get home.
“He’s still sleeping,” Phate replied.
“That’s a good thing, right?” Kien whispered. “This is the first time in weeks he’s been sleep for longer than two hours at a time.”
Phate grabbed the communicator off the side table. “It is. And I hate to do this, but we’ll need to wake him.”
Phate held up the communicator before Kien could ask why. Kien’s eyes went to the device in Phate’s hand and widened when he saw the blinking yellow light.
“A rescue ship is in range to send us an incoming message,” Phate said with a broad grin.
* * *
A DISTINCT THUMPING sound came from her living room.
Tasha opened her eyes. She hadn’t really been asleep. She’d been almost sleep, but thoughts of Phate kept popping into her head. She was exhausted.
Her embarrassment wouldn’t let her interact with her neighbors just yet—and possibly never again. And her mind wouldn’t stop replaying what had happened in the middle of her hallway repeatedly and the pain each time was like it had just happened.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
She frowned and rolled over to glance at the clock on her nightstand. Three twenty-one in the morning.
Who could be knocking on her door this late?
Nisha had crashed on her couch so it couldn’t be her. Besides, Nisha had a key to the apartment. If she’d wanted to come in, she would do so with ease and would’ve been quiet about it.
Tasha sniffed at the air. No sign of smoke or a fire. That would be a reason for a neighbor to be knocking on her door at this hour.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The knocking also wasn’t urgent or hard, indicating an emergency. She could ignore it, or she could answer it. But since she wasn’t getting much sleep anyway, she got up and grabbed the robe hanging from the back of her door.
She knew the route to her front door like the back of her hand and walked through her apartment with ease without turning on a light and waking Nisha.
As soon as she opened the door, she realized she hadn’t looked through the peep hole first. A no-no for a single woman living alone. “Well, this is how I get murdered tonight,” she grumbled as the door swung open.
Standing on the other side was a shirtless and very distraught looking Phate. His blond hair curled in every direction. His pillowcase had made a crease on the side of his cheek. Without a shirt, his chest and stomach muscles were on full display and her body reacted accordingly.
Her nipples hardened. Tingling erupted at the apex of her thighs as her gaze dipped to the tight cotton briefs hugging his hips. Pleasure fired up and down her spine as her eyes locked on the bulge that outlined a very impressive cock laying against his powerful thigh.
“Tasha.”
Tasha shook her head. She wasn’t supposed to still have this reaction toward him. She should’ve hated the sight of him. But here she was, about to melt into a pool of goo because the man had a body like a Greek God. “What?” Was all she trusted herself to say.
“I received a message from home.”
She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she waved a hand for him to continue.
“It’s...it’s...” Phate cursed under his breath and shifted on his feet. “Complicated.”
Tasha raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “Complicated is what you change your Facebook profile to. It’s not the reason you use for knocking on your neighbor’s door in the middle of the night.”
She took a step back to close the door. Phate smacked a palm against the frame. “Wait. A rescue is on the way. We’re leaving sooner than expected.”
She should’ve said good riddance and slammed the door. Instead, she asked, “When are you leaving?”
Phate dropped his arm to his side. “One Earth month.”
Her heart dropped to the pit of her stomach. She should be happy he was leaving. But that wasn’t the emotion cursing through her veins.
Sad.
Sad that she didn’t have more time with him.
Upset.
Upset at herself for feeling sad. There were other emotions as well, but those two stood out the strongest.
Wait.
Tasha frowned. “Rescue? Earth month?”
Phate glanced toward the open door of his apartment then thrust his fingers through his curls, leaving them messier than ever.
“You’re the one that came knocking on my door in the middle of the night to tell me that you’re leaving in a month, not today. If you don’t want to tell me, fine. Don’t bother me.” She started to close the door again, but he stiffened the arm still stretched between them bracing the door open with his hand.
“Like I said, it’s complicated.”
Tasha crossed her arms. “Like I said, save it for a Facebook post. So, you’re getting rescued or whatever. You’re leaving. We didn’t share anything special. You’ve made certain of that. Why tell me this?”
Despite her best efforts, her voice cracked toward the end.
“Because we did share something special. I know and I think you do too.” Tasha opened her mouth to tell him what she thought about their “special moment”, but he silenced her with a hand. “It was special, Tasha. No matter what happened afterward. The moment itself was special. I, how do you say? Fucked it up. I shouldn’t have gone out with anyone after being with you. I should’ve defied orders.”
“Rescue? An Earth month? And now following orders?” Tasha blew out a heavy breath. “Phate, if you don’t tell me what’s going on right now, I’m shutting this door and putting my back into it. I’m exhausted and I don’t have the energy to deal with you standing on my doorstep talking in code. Either shit or get off the pot.”
He frowned, glancing away then back at her. “I don’t understand what that means. Why do you want me to have a bowel movement?”
Tasha sucked her teeth. “It’s a saying. It means to hurry up or move on. You’ve got two seconds to decide if you want to tell me what’s going on or not.”
Phate glanced toward his apartment once again. Her frustration overruled her need to figure out what his issue was. She moved to shut the door and made good on her promise by leaning her weight against the door.
“I’m not from here,” he said as he wedged a knee between the shrinking gap.
“I know that already. The accents are a dead giveaway.” She grunted as she dug her feet into the carpet, putting more strength into her efforts.
“Ouch!” Phate exclaimed as the heavy wood door slammed on the side of his knee. “I mean, I’m not from Earth. I’m from a different planet.”
Tasha paused. “A different planet? What does that even mean?”
“It means Earth isn’t my home.”
Tasha rolled to press her back against the door and laughed. “If you don’t want to keep in touch after you move out, just say it. Don’t go making up a crazy ass story.”
“I’m not making it up. We crashed here over four months ago.”
Tasha, still pressed on the door, studied Phate. He didn’t appear to have a few screws missing. In fact, he looked very sincere. He also didn’t look like he was joking. There wasn’t a hint of a smile on his face.
She narrowed her eyes on him. “What angle are you getting at? I wasn’t going to try to keep in touch with you after you left. You made it quite apparent that us...we...we’re nothing. Why come here and lie to me? What are you gaining from this, Phate?”
He shrugged massive shoulders. “What I hope to gain? I want to right the wrong I caused.”
Her hands were balled into fists. She wanted to pop him in his face. “By giving me some cockamamie lie?!”
He raised his hands into a pleading motion. “Tasha, it’s not a lie. If you stop trying to close the door, I’ll give you the full truth.”
Tasha thought about putting her back into it and slamming the door, his knee be damned. But in the end, she relented, wanting to hear what he had to say instead. She opened the door but blocked entry into her apartment. With arms crossed over her chest, she said, “Spill it.”
Phate breathed a sigh of relief. “Some time ago, we...meaning some watchers on our home planet, received a transmission from Earth. It was unlike anything that anyone living had ever received before. There was a description of what humans looked like, where your planet was located in the galaxy and about basic life here on Earth. It was decided that we needed to investigate.
“Although we have allies on different planets, we, like Earth, live in a secluded part of the galaxy. Actually, we thought we were the farthest planet in this part of the galaxy. The transmission was a big discovery. Aside from being the only intelligent species for lightyears in any direction, we also don’t have any compatible species near us. That all changed after we received your transmission.
“We could now have close neighbors to share technology, become allies and possibly intermingle with. But first we needed to send a recognizance mission to get updated information on this new species.”
Tasha tried to wrap her head around what Phate was saying but none of it made a lick of sense. “Wait. So, you’re telling me you’re from another planet and you’re here because of some transmission?”
Phate nodded. “We weren’t supposed to come down here. We should’ve been in our spaceship, cloaked in space, gathering information. If your sun’s solar flare hadn’t happened, which caused our systems to malfunction, we would’ve still been up there.”
“Well, actually.” Kien suddenly stepped into the hallway and Tasha jumped. “We wouldn’t still be here. We would’ve gotten the information a long time ago, downloaded it to the home base and been on Pesna-9 having our much-needed vacation.”
Tasha placed a hand on her head and shook it. “You can’t possibly be in on this stupid lie too.”
“Yes!” Solgre stepped out next. “This is all a lie.” Then he turned to Phate and pulled him close. “What are you doing?” he whispered urgently.
Phate kept his gaze on her. “I’m telling Tasha how I feel about her.”
Solgre humphed. “It looks like you’re telling her everything but how you feel about her.”
“I was getting to that part,” Phate grumbled.
Solgre shook his head. “How you feel doesn’t matter. We’ll be leaving this place soon, we’ll give the home world the information we’ve gathered, and we can leave this behind us.”
The pieces were starting to fall in place now. Their accents, their speech patterns, the serial dating for “research”, how they didn’t quite understand human customs, and their fashion sense. “This is true?” Tasha asked, stunned.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Phate said.
Tasha raised her chin. “I need some proof.”
Phate didn’t hesitate to grab something from Solgre’s hand, ignoring Solgre when he bit out Phate’s name. “This is proof,” he said holding up what looked like a nondescript item that was the size of a remote control but bulkier.
Tasha raised her eyebrows. “And what exactly is that?”
Phate turned a knob and pressed a few buttons then handed it to her. Tasha accepted the item and glanced at the screen. It was full of green numbers, or were they words or pictures? She didn’t know what any of it meant.
“That’s the message from the rescue ship,” Phate said.
“I can’t read your language.”
Phate leaned over and pressed a series of other buttons. A planet showed, she recognized it as Earth. Then Phate swiped left and she saw the other planets in the solar system and after Pluto, Phate kept swiping and swiping past other planets, so many planets.
“Wh-what is this?”
“These are all the planets in this sector.” Then he finally stopped at a planet that looked almost like Earth. “This is Thelli. Our planet.”
“Where you’re from?”
“Correct.”
Instead of having to be embarrassed that Nisha, Kien and Solgre knew she’d been played, she was even more embarrassed an entire, fucking, alien planet would know.
Her skin prickled with heat. Anger she’d never felt before raged within her chest. “This. Us. Our night together. It was part of an experiment and now you’re going to tell your people about how easy it was to fuck a stupid human woman.”
She gripped her doorframe ready to slam it in their faces.
“That’s not true!” Phate protested.
“It really is,” Kien added dryly.
“They’ll want that information,” Solgre said with a nod.
“Oh my God!” Tasha screamed, stepping back to give herself room to slam the door.
Phate held his hands to his friends. “Tasha, you weren’t a part of some experiment. Dating the other women was, but not you. Never you. What I feel for you is real. Being with you was real. It wasn’t a game or a lie.”
She glared at him through the slits of her eyes that were now watering. “That doesn’t matter, Phate. You’re some alien and you’ll be leaving.”
Phate took a step toward her and surprisingly she didn’t step back. Her pulse pounded and not because he professed to being an alien another world. “That’s true. I don’t want to spend what little time I have left here apart from you. I want to experience this world and all it has to offer with you by my side.”
“We have a mission, Phate,” Solgre said, pointing a finger in his direction. “You’ll spend the rest of your time here seeing to that and collecting data for the others.”
Phate turned toward Solgre and squared his shoulders. “I quit.”
Solgre sputtered. “Y-you can’t quit!”
Phate raised a defiant chin. “I can and I did.”
“Wait was that an option?” Kien asked. “Because if it is, I want to quit too. I want to travel and see this world before we leave. I’m tired of the endless dates.”
“It looks like you were having fun from where I’m sitting!” Nisha yelled from inside the apartment.
“Great Ancients!” Solgre said, rounding on Phate. “How many people are you planning on telling? Is the goal to have us sliced up on television for these humans’ viewing pleasure?”
“If only,” Nisha grumbled as she made her way to stand next to Tasha.
Nisha was dressed in her oversized pajamas and had a brightly colored bonnet protecting her hair.
Solgre pointed at them both. “You must keep this a secret. Our lives are in jeopardy.”
Nisha raised her chin in the air. “I can’t stand Kien but that doesn’t mean I want to be watching his autopsy on the dark web.”
“How gracious of you,” Kien grumbled.
Tasha looped her arm with Nisha’s. “She’ll keep quiet about this. We both will.”
Nisha humphed.
“Tasha, I don’t know what the future holds for me or for us, but these past few days have been a living nightmare, knowing I hurt you and I broke your trust. If you’ll let me, I’ll spend my remaining days on Earth making it up to you.”
This was going to hurt. It surely was. But it would be good.
“Okay.”
* * *
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU can’t fix it remotely?” Agent Margie Santana said into her satellite cellphone. She’d been on the phone with IT for almost an hour trying to get some help in fixing the listening device. Nothing they’d suggested worked.
“You’ll have to fix it yourself,” the IT lady said.
“And how am I supposed to do that?” Margie pinched the bridge of her nose. Her eyes hurt. Her head hurt. Everything hurt.
“Do you still have the manual provided with it?”
Margie thought about it. She remembered the tattered directions in the case. “Yes.”
“There you go!”
Margie erupted from her seat at the kitchen table. “What do you mean? I don’t know how to fix this thing. I’ll need tools and...and...other stuff.”
“I guess you better head on over to the Walmart.”
Margie. Seethed.
She would be spending her evening fixing outdated equipment. Hopefully, she wasn’t missing anything important going on downstairs.