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Authors: Interstellar Lover

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BOOK: Dawn Autumn
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“Hm. Looks like either dental hygienist or exotic dancer. Not exactly my cup of tea,” she muttered to herself. She’d already applied at the few waitress and clerk jobs advertised, with no calls yet. Ah, well. There was always the paper route. If she delivered in the mornings and worked at the café in the afternoons, she should be all right ... if she was very, very frugal. Fortunately, she excelled at frugal.

Tossing down the paper, she held her mug in both hands and let her eyes unfocus, thinking of nothing in particular. She was tired, with a warm meal in her belly, and had no greater concern at the moment than preparing for bed.

Sudden movement made her stare at the fridge. The door had cracked. Was the seal going bad? Did anything work right in this dive? She set down her cup, prepared to investigate. Before she could, a giant green slug with an upright carriage slid out of her fridge. She froze. It was the size of a man, glistening green, and definitely not something she’d carted home from the grocery. Stupefied, she stared as it turned its eyestalks toward her, nodded politely, and slithered on to the door. A gelatinous tentacle slithered out of its body and wrapped around the door knob. As he was making his exit, three more slugs came out of the fridge, each smaller than the other, like a mother and stair step children. They hurried after him/it, ignoring her. The last one out slammed the door.

The sound galvanized Jay. Leaping to her feet, she hurried to the door, barely noticing as clear slime soaked into her socks. Throwing open the door, she stared as the last of the slugs disappeared into Mr. and Mrs. Fadious’ apartment. Certain they were about to eat her helpless neighbors in a painful and disgusting manner, Jay dashed toward their door—only to end up sliding in the trail of gook. The next thing she knew, her head slammed back against the floor, and the lights went out.

* * * *

Voices woke her. Scrunching her eyes shut, she cautiously opened them, blinking against the bright glare. Her neighbor’s worried faces appeared above her. Mrs. Fadious’ ever present curlers and hair net rose above her pointed brows and heavy bone structure. Mr. Fadious’ square face and old fashioned fedora hat blocked a large part of the ceiling, but she could see bits of Fred and Cole’s faces peering down at her.

“She lives!” Mrs. Fadious said in her low pitched voice.

Groaning, Jay slowly sat up, grateful for the hands supporting her back. She lifted her hand to her throbbing head and noticed the slime coating her palm. She looked quickly up at Mrs. Fadious.

Before she could speak, Mrs. Fadious grimaced. “I’m so sorry! A jug of cleaner broke as I was carrying it in. I hurried in to get a mop, but when I got back you were here on the floor.”

Jay stared at her. Keeping her mouth shut, she painfully got to her feet, limped to her door, and opened it wide to stare at the carpet. It was perfectly clean. She knelt down and touched it. It was dry. Blinking, she slowly moved to her fridge, took a deep breath, and threw the door wide. Nothing but leftovers and a few drying carrots peeked back. She needed to go shopping.

“Are you all right?” Fred said cautiously, hovering just out of arms reach. She ignored him. The rest of her neighbors watched with expressions of concern from just outside her door as she moved back to check the inside knob.

It was clean, too.

“I think I need to go to bed,” Jay said slowly, reaching up to feel the knot on the back of her head. Either she was losing her mind, or she was more tired than she thought, but something didn’t add up.

She didn’t bother shutting the door, just headed for her room. In the doorway she paused, one hand on the frame. She half turned, not meeting anyone’s eye. “Do you know why I was in the hallway, Mrs. Fadious?”

“Why, no, dear. Maybe it will come to you in the morning?”

Nodding, Jay entered her room and shut the door.

* * * *

Cole stared at Fred, silently daring him to speak up.

Fred looked away from Jay’s door and shoved his thumbs through his belt loops, avoiding the inevitable. Everyone was looking at him, waiting to see what he would do. Unfortunately, he’d already done everything he could.

“You have to tell her,” Cole said evenly, staring him down.

“Can’t. Regulations,” Fred said firmly. “I notified the transit department, chewed some butt, and hopefully the techies are scurrying around to fix the problem. They‘ll find the idiot who opened a door in unauthorized space and flush him.”

Mr. Fadious snorted, glanced at his wife, and both of them left the scene before the manure got any deeper.

Cole inclined his head and crossed his arms. “And if they don’t? Worse, what if it’s a hacker manipulating the system to slip in a few illegal aliens? Your little woman is going to be all alone in there.”

Frustrated by the whole situation, Fred slipped off his annoying glasses and rubbed at his silver eyes. Sometimes he hated being a traffic cop. Falling for a civilian from a low tech world wasn’t making his life easier, especially when she had no concept of the reality of interstellar travel. If his irate superiors hadn’t transferred him to the back of beyond, he never would have met her, never would have been faced with the probability of rejection if she learned the truth about him and this house. “I’ll up the security sensitivity and try to spend more time with her.”

“Or you could try to explain.” Cole had little patience with bureaucracy, and even less with Fred’s careful courtship. He was the type to throw a likely wench over his shoulder and carry her to his harem, overcoming obstacles as he went. Mulling the situation over, weighing the pros and cons, just wasn’t his style.

Pushed too far, Fred leveled a cool stare on him. “Give it time. I want to make sure it can even work before bring up galactic issues. She doesn’t even like me yet.”

“Take off your clown suit and show her your true—”

“It’s the most effective disguise,” Fred interrupted. “You’re the one assigned the playboy role. I have to keep up the respectable front if we want to keep our cover as an unremarkable bunch of renters. You know what happens when I be myself.” In his youth, he’d enjoyed the feminine attention, but lately it had gotten old. These days he had just one woman on his mind, and the persistent pursuit of others had become annoying.

He wanted
her
.

Cole’s lips twitched. “Yeah, it’s a curse. Still, if you’re bright, you’ll put those babe magnets of yours to good use on our little chili pepper.” He pointed to his eyes with two fingers, and then dropped the argument to return to his room.

Frowning with the concern he couldn’t display earlier, Fred turned and looked at Jay’s open door. She’d looked terribly bewildered, and he couldn’t blame her. They’d made quick work of cleaning up after her visitors, but the way she’d searched her apartment in a daze made him feel wretched. The poor girl probably thought she was going crazy. Maybe he could make up a story about a broken gas line with hallucinogenic side effects. She’d probably be relieved.

Mentally embellishing his story, he wandered into her apartment for one last look around and spied the open paper on the counter. Noticing the circled advertisements, he leaned over for a closer look. His brows shot up in surprise when he saw the dental hygienist and stripper adds. She hadn’t been to college, much less dental school, and he couldn’t envision her as a stripper. Well, he
could
, but not in a public performance.

Shaking his head to clear it, he twirled his glasses by the earpiece and stared at her closed door, almost hoping she’d poke her head out. She needed a better job. He needed to keep her from debasing herself to keep a roof over her head. Maybe he had a solution that would solve both their problems.

* * * *

“A gas leak?” Jay stared at Fred over her coffee cup, willing away the dull ache in her head. The painkiller hadn’t kicked in yet. At least the caffeine would shake away some of the bleariness of a too early wake up call.

Fred had knocked on her door at 6:30 am...on her day off. That he came bearing breakfast was the only thing that saved him from instant annihilation. Armed with a tray full of bacon, eggs, and cinnamon rolls fresh from the corner diner, he’d sidled past her guard and coaxed her to the counter. Now he sat across from her with his baseball cap on backwards, his tinted glasses smudged and a paint smear down the left side of his face, trying to cheer her up.

“I didn’t know you weren’t a morning person,” he said apologetically as he downed his third egg.

Jay grunted and picked up a cinnamon roll. She’d better start. At the rate he was eating, there’d be nothing left. Where did he put it all? He ought to weigh three hundred pounds if he ate like this every day. “I loathe mornings,” she said in her pre-caffeine growl, her glower communicating just how much she hated morning people, too. “I don’t believe there was a gas leak, either.” Stubborn in her grouchiness, she stared him down.

He considered her calmly over his third cinnamon roll. “What do you think happened?”

Since she’d had plenty of time to think about that during the long night while she sat in bed, cuddling her baseball bat and staring balefully at her locked bedroom door, she said flatly, “I got a good whiff of the stuff that had soaked into my socks and the back of my clothes. It wasn’t cleaner. Cleaners smell soapy and over perfumed—that stuff smelled like ....” She narrowed her eyes at him. “It smelled like the chemicals you seem to bathe in.” So it was rude—she didn’t care. Somebody was lying to her, and she didn’t appreciate it.

Clearly affronted, he sat back. “I smell? And bathroom cleaners don’t always smell good.”

Slowly she shook her head. “It’s not a bathroom cleaner. You smell like...moldy leaves, sulfur and gasoline. It makes me want to sneeze, only it’s not as strong as the stuff on my socks last night.”

He stared at her, seemingly caught between indignation, anger, and amusement.

Let him. He deserved it for that gas leak story. “I ran out of my apartment because I saw something leaving it. Something’s going on around here, and I think you know what it is.” The huge streak on his glasses was driving her crazy. Little things did that in the morning. Combined with her lack of sleep, that tiny little provocation might just send her over the edge.

“You’re clearly in need of more sleep,” he said with an edge of temper to his voice. He started to clean up. “I’ll see you later, after you’ve had a chance to nap.”

Before he could get up, Jay reached out and snatched his glasses from his face.

Instantly, he closed his eyes. “Give those back, Jay.” He was calm, but far from happy.

Ignoring the command in his tone, she leisurely polished the lenses on her t-shirt, studying what she could see of his turned down face. “You know, light sensitive I can understand, but you, my friend, are hiding your eyes. I’m curious to know why.” She blew on the lenses, fogging them, and then resumed polishing.

He held out his hand. “Give them back, Jay.” His tone was as cold as interstellar space.

Finished with her polishing, she held the glasses up in front of her eyes and looked around. “Funny, this is either the weakest prescription I’ve ever seen, or these are plain glass.” Almost daring him to try and take them, she folded her arms across her chest, holding tight to her prize as she regarded him with jaded eyes.

BOOK: Dawn Autumn
8.4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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