Learning to Blush (13 page)

“
Who
followed you?” Mike asked in a frustrated hiss.

“Bad guys. Bad guys with big guns who are good at finding people they don’t like.” Ellie couldn’t have been more puzzling if she tried.

“Huh?”

“Move it, Kids!” Graham hissed, and Penny felt Ellie pull her through the darkness, weaving effortlessly through the room. Finally the cold air of the parking lot hit her face, but there were no stars overhead. Everything was still completely dark. It was as if a blanket had been pulled over her eyes; she couldn't see her hand in front of her face!

WHOOOM. There was a blaring noise that was so low-pitched that it felt like it was vibrating Penny’s brain. She let go of Ellie and clutched her hands to her ears.

“Penny! Where are you?” Ellie sounded like she was already across the parking lot.

“What is that?” she called out after the silence returned.

A strong hand closed around her upper arm. “Penny, we need to go,” Thorton’s voice warned in her ear.

“No!” Penny refused, jerking her arm away from him. “What the hell is going on?”

Suddenly a large, blue light lit the sky like a lightning strike… Revealing one very large, very round spaceship. Penny could barely breathe when she saw it—she had never been so awed or afraid in her life. Thorton moved fast and quickly tossed her over his broad shoulder. “Don’t worry, I got you,” she heard him say. In the distance, she heard Mike’s car slowly whine and roar to life, and it sounded like it wasn’t happy about it, as if it had had a dead battery before.

Don’t worry?
“Are-are those-those…?” Even she sounded out of breath, but he was the one racing into the woods.

“They’re called Frians.”

“Frians?”

“They’ve been harvesting humans for decades for their slave population. They probably saw us fly in and are scouting the area for us… But we’ll be okay. I promise,” Thorton replied with a hoarse whisper as he sprinted towards the car.

Penny just closed her eyes and tried to wake herself up from this nightmare.

Chapter Six

“What the fuck?” Mike squeaked out. He didn’t look very well; under his overly freckled skin, his face was completely drained of color. He had never been so terrified.

“Buckle up,” Ellie advised, sitting in the front-middle seat of the SUV as it raced along the completely black roads with no headlights on.

“Why? What the fuck’s going on? Are those ALIENS?”

Her reply lacked all emotion, scared or otherwise, as she said, “Yeah, big, scaly green ones.” Suddenly Graham hit a speed bump that sent them all flying. The boys’ faces smacked against the dashboard of the car while Thorton’s grip around Penny’s body merely tightened as he held her firmly on his lap. “Told ya to buckle up.”

“Dude, this is fucking nuts! We’re gonna die! You can’t see a goddamned thing!” Tom shrieked, reaching over Graham’s chair to try to see how fast they were going. “We can’t do ninety on this road!”

“Graham’s eyesight is twenty/twenty right now, guys. Just try not to throw up or piss your pants,” Ellie assured, but even she was gripping her hands around Graham’s torso and was holding on tight.

“Do you even know where you’re going?”

“Yeah, we just came from there,” Ellie replied, looking like she was forcing herself to act like this was normal. “I dropped off some of my stuff on the way to the bar.”

“From where?” Mike demanded.

“Um…”

“Guys,” Graham said patiently, although his jaw was locked, his eyes focused on the road ahead and the alien spacecraft in the rearview mirror with searchlights beaming around and through the nearby trees, looking for them. Graham seemed to be swerving around the searchlights, keeping perfectly in the veil of darkness with the car's headlights still off. “I need you to bear with me, okay? Let’s play the
quiet game
.”

“Graham, we’re all adults here…” Ellie said with a nervous giggle.

Graham swerved around another search light, saying, “And you lose the practice round, Sweetie. The object is to stay quiet so I don’t make a wrong turn and kill us all.”

That definitely made them all very silent, even though there were definitely more questions to ask, and at least a million of those questions were very important.

Penny began to whisper, “Where're we going?” to Thorton, whose lips were only an inch from her ear.

“Somewhere safe,” he said, and then he turned towards the backseat, where the boys were looking forward with frightened, dead eyes… Except for Tim, who seemed to think that this was all just a big joke or a video game, since his eyes were round and wild with excitement. “Guys, when we get out of the car, I need you to follow orders. I need you to go exactly where we tell you to, and I need you do exactly what we tell you to do. No questions. Go fast. If you’re slow, we will all die. If you ask questions, we will all die. If you stop to gawk or look around, we will all die.”

“Erhm,” Penny said uncomfortably, wondering how the night could have turned so dark and terrifying so quickly. She wasn’t used to feeling
afraid
. She had Mike and two older brothers, all who were huge—fear was one thing she had never been bedfellows with.

“Do you understand?” Thorton asked seriously.

The boys nodded, and remained silent, but Penny began to shake her head, fret swelling up in her chest. What were they about to see? Why wouldn’t they answer any of their questions? She had a horrible feeling. “I can’t do this. I can’t…” she said, trembling.

“I got you, Beautiful. Don’t worry. When we stop, I'll carry you. Just close your eyes. Can you do that? Just close your eyes for me…”

* * *

“Open your eyes for me, Beautiful…” Thorton’s voice echoed above her. Penny felt his gloved fingers play with the hair around her face. Her eyes fluttered open to the dim, golden light that lit through the main cabin on the Swarii Space Vessel. Thorton grinned kindly and said, “Another bad dream?”

She nodded. She’d had bad dreams nearly every night since they’d all escaped from the Frians six weeks ago.

The escape hadn’t been easy. After they got out of the car, there had been a spaceship in front of them that they had to board just to keep from being blasted at from aliens on-high. And talk about ‘blasting’! Half the forest was on fire. And worse, they were
chased
out of the atmosphere; the moon had gone by with a swift blur as Graham and Thorton tried to pilot them through the galaxy with a whole mess of very pissed off Frians right on their house-sized ship’s ass, trying to blow them up.

Those damn green, scaly aliens nearly succeeded, too. They certainly hadn't offered them any breathing room, and they fried half of the outer parts of the ship, including a lot of their fuel and even their communications tower, which meant that now they had no radio and no way to contact help. Luckily, they had enough to soon be able to get them to an almost safe and semi-populated solar system that might have the parts they needed…

But still, they had been on the ship over a month already, and she still couldn’t get over the horror that she had felt.

“How’d you know I was having nightmares?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. When she had fallen asleep, she had been in the middle of playing a board game with her brothers. Now, the board game was cleared away and the boys were seated in front of the over-sized monitor, playing Swarii video games, completely dead to everything and everyone around them.

“Let’s just say you’re a mumbler. Let me get you some water or something.” He gave her a friendly pat on the hip as he slid her feet off of his lap. With a weary groan, he walked around the sofa and towards the kitchen.

She watched him go, mostly admiring his body from her view over the back of the sofa. It didn’t really matter if he was one-hundred percent alien. He was one hot speciman with a fine, fine ass, not to mention he sort of had a roguish pirate thing always going on due to the small gold loop in one of his ears and the tattoo that curled up his neck. She wished he would take off his shirt so she could see the whole thing… But so far, he hadn't given her that delight. He was certainly playing hard-to-get!

Thorton had shown interest in her, he was just shy… Even though he didn't seem shy about anything else. Penny wasn’t unused to chasing down men, but after the last month, she was beginning to run out of breath.

She still jumped off the couch and padded after him towards the kitchen, her feet covered by only her socks. “Hey, Thorton?”

“Hm?”

She sat down in a chair that was bolted to the floor next to a very large dining table. It looked like something she’d find on a submarine… If the submarine was built in the Victorian era yet had the technology of four millennia in the future. Every time she looked around, the word 'steam-punk' came to mind. She played with the edge of the table. “When do we land?”

“On 67761?” he asked, and Penny always marveled how he and Graham could keep the planets straight if they saw them all as numbers… They’d said they would get more confused if they all had names, since there were so many known planets. “I don’t really know—that’s Graham’s area. Tonight or tomorrow, I figure. Then we’ll probably stay for a couple of weeks doing repairs…” He turned and put a glass of water in front of her with a little slice of lemon on the edge of it, just for decoration. He wouldn’t have done that for the boys.

“Do you want to…? You know…
Hang out
when we get there?” she asked, peering at him suggestively. He was now foraging in the several refrigerators; there were no pantries here. Everything was frozen in a way that would preserve the stores for up to one hundred years if necessary.

“We’re hanging out right now. All we ever do is hang out,” he replied simply, completely clueless about her meaning.

She huffed a sigh and crossed her eyes for a moment behind his turned back. That man could be dense. “No, I mean… You know—date.”

He turned around, looked at her, and blinked. “Like… Date as in… Courting?”

“This isn’t the Regency Era, Thorton. Dating’s more casual…”

“But it’s romantic in nature and normally the precursor to marriage?” His face was blank and unreadable.

“Supposedly there’re lots of places on Earth where you can just hop straight to marriage.
I
tend to think dating forever is the way to go. But yeah. I think we’re on the same page there.” She shrugged, just because she didn’t want her nervousness to show.
Just say ‘yes’
, she begged inwardly.
Say yes. Yes!

His face grew firm. “No.” He turned his back again without another word, no explanation.

“Why not?” she heard herself whine. Maybe she sounded childish, maybe even desperate, but she couldn't help it. “Don’t act like you don’t think I’m cute!”

“I think you’re more than cute. Drink your water, sometimes bad dreams are brought on by dehydration…”

“Don’t change the subject!” she demanded, hopping out of her chair and walking up to him. He seemed to be avoiding eye-contact, and so she stepped in front of him. “You like me!”

“You make a better door than a window,” he said, pushing her aside to bring out a small bag of something out of the freezer. He then took it to a microwave-like box, stuck it in, and pressed a button to start the cooking process.

“Thorton! C’mon! We’re good together! And I don’t care about you being an alien!”

He lifted an eyebrow. “
I’m
an alien? You’re the one who grew up in the boonies! Besides, I don’t want a romantic relationship with you.”

“But why?”

Mike came around the corner and, without saying anything, took a bag of drink-mix out of the freezer and started preparing it.

“Because it’s a bad idea!” Thorton replied, echoing her whiny tone. “Mike? Can you please tell Penny why dating me is such a bad idea?”

Mike squinted slightly and gave them both a ‘
how’d I get hooked into this
?’ expression. Penny was surprised that Thorton had asked Mike—she was still unsure whether Thorton or Graham even liked him. They seemed to yell at each other a lot; Mike had fought in a battle of wills with them since they made it out alive at the end of their first warp-jump after Mike had peeled himself out of his chair.

Now, with a roll of his eyes, he said, “Thorton is way too old for you, Pen.”

Thorton’s mouth hung open. “That is not the reason!”

Mike gave Thorton a 'cut the crap' look by lowering his chin and raising his eyebrows knowingly. “You’re like… thirty. You’re twelve years older than her. Gross.”

“Actually, I’m more like forty in Earth years,” he admitted with a grumble, pinching the bridge of his nose. “BUT that is still not the point! I am at the proper marrying age, and she, at least, is ‘of age’ to take a mate. But, again— that’s not the point.”

“Forty?” Mike made a face. “Well, you look good for being an old dude,” he added, then seemed to go back to the drink machine and put his pouch of mix inside.

“I’m not old! Our years and our lifespans are longer, thank you very much. I’m a young man!”

Mike sighed and did not argue. He turned his body, and looked at Penny. “Alright, then… Penny, he thinks red heads are ugly. Such is our lot. Girls have decided that about me many a time… As Dad used to say, ‘I’d rather be dead then red in the head.’ Welcome to my world of being alone and ostracized.” He patted her on the shoulder consolingly.

Penny’s mouth hung open with hurt and worry.

“No! It’s not that—Mike, shut up! You’re useless,” Thorton demanded, pointing to Mike.

Mike shrugged and took his newly-poured drink in hand. “Then I really can’t think of any other reason why you wouldn’t want her, Thorton. You should BE so lucky. Penny’s awesome.
I’d
take her if she wasn’t related, or if we were from West Virginia or somewhere where I could fish from the family pond.”

Penny laughed. “Thanks, Mike. But I'm not up for dating a red-head anyway. Even if incest
was
best.” She winked playfully at him.

Mike laughed and ruffled Penny’s hair like he’d done since she was five, only stopping when her braid was sufficiently ruined.