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“It is a difficult question to answer,” he said after a pause. “I do not know how to compare hungry. My English is serviceable in many respects, but I am coming to understand better its limitations. The use of the TV is a help to me.”

Daria stacked the clean plate in the cupboard and emptied the sink. She washed it out, watching him discretely in the window and listening to him pick through his words in his careful, measured way. For no reason at all, and certainly not with any conscious thought, she feigned a yawn and a stretch, arching her back and reaching for the ceiling, letting her breasts push out the front of her t-shirt in two distinct handfuls.

Tagen’s voice slowed and stopped. After a moment, he began again, but not in the same vein. “May I ask a question, Daria Cleavon? I suspect it will make you uncomfortable.”

She looked at him, instinctively stepping back and crossing her arms over her chest. “What?” she said warily.

He averted his eyes, searching the walls around him as though for a hidden script. At last he looked at her again, visibly steeled against her. “What is the function of breasts?” he asked.

She couldn’t quite process that right away. It was as though he had asked what fingers were for. “Well, they…Some people think…” She trailed off and stared at him, blinking.

He waited, watching her intently. His eyes, those piercing hawk-like eyes, never wavered.

It was an anatomy lesson. Well, what did she think? Of course he wasn’t really checking her out. He was an alien. Or she was, or whatever.

“Mostly, they’re for nursing babies,” she said. “I mean, that’s the big-picture reason for having them. But they’re also a, um, attractive part of the female body for a lot of people.” She could feel herself blushing, but Tagen merely nodded. “It’s not polite to talk about people’s breasts,” she finished, and started pulling mixing bowls and pans out of their places.

“I do not know the words ‘nursing babies’.” He pronounced this oddly: nur seen bay bees. After a moment, during which she did not answer, he said, “Babies is more than one? More than one…bab?”

“Baby,” she corrected. “A little human. A…you know, a baby.”

“Ah. Offspring. Yes.” He waited. “And what is nur seen?”

“When the baby is first born, its mother makes milk to feed it. From her breasts,” she added as Tagen’s eye went to the refrigerator.

He rocked back and stared at her. “Do you really?” he asked. He made it sound like she’d told him a mother could produce pink champagne from one boob and working parts for a radio from the other.

“Well, what do your females do?” she asked. “I assume you do have females.”

“Of course we have,” he said, looking astonished. “But they do not nur seen. Nothing I know of nur seens apart from a very few small animals.”

“It’s nurses, Tagen. Babies nurse. The act is called nursing. Nurse, nurses plural, nursed past tense, nursing verb.”

He processed this for a few seconds, his eyes shut, and then looked at her and said, “Jotan young do not nurse,” and raised an eyebrow at her.

She nodded, and said, “What do they eat when they’re first born, then?”

“Everything,” he said, with a thin smile. “It must be soft, that is all. In the past, I suppose, females would chew the…the baby’s food first. Now there is food sold especially for them.”

“Well, we have milk sold especially for our babies, too, but a lot of mothers prefer to nurse anyway.” She was out of the danger zone for this conversation and her curiosity was piqued, so as she began to mix pancake batter, she said, “So your females don’t have breasts?”

“No.”

“What do they have?”

He cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“How can you tell each other apart if they don’t have breasts?”

“Ah.” He sat back in his chair as Daria began pouring pancakes onto the hot griddle. “Much the same way you humans do, I think. Females are smaller. Slimmer. And we can smell the difference, understand.”

“Smell…? Seriously?”

“Oh yes.”

There was a sincerity in his voice that made Daria wonder, just for an uneasy instant, if he could smell her, too. She didn’t ask. A thought occurred to her, though, and she turned all the way around to say, “But you’re a man, right? Or are you?”

He seemed dramatically taken aback, and for a second or two, insulted. Then he looked down at his chest, glanced at hers, and relaxed slightly. “Yes,” he said. “I am male.” He muttered something in his language, and then added, “I suppose I should have anticipated that.”

Daria brought him the first two pancakes on a plate, along with some syrup and a fork. He grasped the utensil with an air of uncertainty, but did not ask for instruction. He ate slowly, as one doing it for the first time. His expression was mildly bewildered.

“Is it okay?” she asked.

“It is…sweet.” He looked up at her, his brow beetling. “Everything you eat is so sweet.”

She’d never thought about, but now that he mentioned it, it was true. “Not everything,” she argued vaguely. “The soup I gave you that first day was minestrone. That’s salty, not sweet. And you don’t have to have syrup, you know.”

“I like sweet,” he said, considering his plate. “I am just not accustomed to it in such abundance.” He finished his pancake and she came to give him two more. “Will you not eat?”

“In a bit. I might as well finish cooking first.” She hadn’t made very much batter. Enough for four more pancakes, maybe. Two more for him, and two for her.

“Hm.”

It was a darkly judicial sound, and Daria glanced around, suddenly defensive. “What?”

“I said nothing.”

She put the hand that held the spatula on her hip and glared at him. “Spit it out, spaceman.”

“You will cook,” he said, avoiding her eyes as he meticulously used his fork to separate his pancakes into geometric shapes. “Then you will clean.” He flicked his gaze around the counters briefly. “Everything,” he said.

That stung. That stung hard. “I will not,” she said.

He ate his breakfast and didn’t answer.

She cooked the last four pancakes, tight-lipped and strangely shaken.

“I don’t have to stop right now and clean everything,” she announced, taking the plate to the table where he waited. “It can wait. I’m not obsessive. I just don’t like dirty dishes cluttering up the whole place, that’s all.” She sat down, helped herself to a pancake and smothered it in syrup. “You make it sound like I go flying off the handle every time I see a crumb on the floor. I don’t.”

Batter from the side of the mixing bowl was dripping slowly down to the countertop. The griddle was just sitting there with grease congealing on its surface as it cooled.

Tagen was watching her, his face expressionless.

“I’m not crazy, you know,” she told him. “You don’t have to be crazy just to like it neat.”

He ate another pancake and said nothing.

The spatula was lying on the stovetop, facedown in a little pool of brown butter and soggy pancake crust. Just lying there.

“Go to hell,” Daria snapped, and shoved her chair back. She went to clean up the stove.

She heard him sigh. She didn’t hear him leave, but he was gone when she turned around.

*

Kane’s hand fell on her out of darkness, shaking reality back into her and shattering her dreams—dreams of a home she could no longer easily remember when she was awake. These days, Kane pretty much ate up all her waking thoughts. Raven struggled into a sitting position, wincing as pain flared through her pelvis so completely that she couldn’t tell what hurt from what just sympathized with what hurt.

She spread her legs wide, moaning as air and air alone touched her throbbing core. Gradually, the blurry ache that overwhelmed her tapered into dozens of tiny pains. She fell back against the leg of the table where she’d fallen asleep, fingers and toes curling at the carpet, grappling with the pain.

She could feel Kane staring at her. It took her several minutes and many aborted starts before she could open her eyes and look at him.

His arms were folded, his legs set firmly apart, and his dark eyes were alert to her every movement. “How do you feel?” he asked finally.

Was he kidding? Raven squeezed her eyes shut again, concentrating on just breathing without whimpering and not writhing, not waking the pain up any further. But…

“Not as bad as I should,” she admitted. She reached down and prodded tentatively at her labia. It ached like a black tooth, but it wasn’t unbearable.

Kane dropped to one knee and put his hand on her thigh, opening her even wider. His hand brushed beside hers and Raven tensed apprehensively. His eye fell on her, dark with humor. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, and returned his attention to her piercings.

He inspected every ring and rivet closely, then touched a claw to the hoops in her belly, tugging at the chain that now belted her. He took her arm and turned it so that he could growl appreciatively at the swollen outline of her new tattoo. He glanced over her breasts and her eyebrows, then looked again at her sex, frowning. Finally, he stood up again. “I have something for you.”

He walked around her and took a shampoo bottle off the table to pass down to her. “Use this twice a day,” he said. “If this lasts you more than two days, you aren’t using enough.”

Raven uncapped the bottle and sniffed it. The contents were thin and pearly and smelled faintly of minerals. She tapped a little out into her palm, glanced at him, and dabbed it onto one of her nipple rings.

It cooled in a way that made her think of mint ice cream and she immediately tapped out more lotion and rubbed it in with enthusiasm. “Thanks.”

“Mm.” He paced around her again, his claws flexing on his powerful biceps, watching her. “No shower for you,” he said. “Let it soak in.”

“I smell.”

“I don’t mind.” He smiled, drawing in a lungful of air, and let his gaze fall below her waist. “Not at all.”

She ducked her head and rubbed lotion on herself, hiding her sex from him.

He laughed at her. “Relax, it’s cool enough in here. Can you stand up?”

She tried. It took a long time and she had to lean heavily on the table. Putting her weight, any of her weight, on her legs made the pain in her pussy break open and bleed all through her. By the time she got to her feet, her vision was swimming in tears.

Kane made a sound, a kind of hissing click through his teeth, and he knelt down and had a closer look at her. The light touch of his fingers on her pussy was excruciating. Raven managed not to cry out, but she was shaking with the effort by the time he leaned back.

“All right,” he muttered, scratching thoughtfully at his throat.

Raven started hobbling toward the bathroom.

“No shower,” he reminded her, pulling his chair out and sitting before his computer.

“I have to pee.”

He grunted, but he let her go by herself, for which she was pitifully grateful. When she came out of the bathroom, he was waiting for her with his injector-thingie in his hand.

“What is that?” she asked uneasily.

“Your new best friend.” He put the device against her arm and sent its contents into her with a sting and a hiss.

Instantly, warmth bloomed out from the injection point, blushing up her arm and throughout her body to spread sunshine in her brain. That fast. Fast like getting hit by a bus. A big, happy bus. Raven drew in a breath, stepped back, and released it as a “Ooo.”

“Nice shit, huh?” Kane turned away.

“Very nice.” Raven watched his muscles ripple down his bare back as Kane replaced his injector in his pack. His whole body seemed alive to her, fluid and powerful and so clarified. “You sexy beast,” she said, and giggled.

He laughed with her. “Go lie down,” he told her. “And don’t get too used to that shit because you aren’t getting it for long.”

“I feel pretty good.”

“I know you do. Lie down, Raven.”

She dropped onto the bed, bounced a little while, and then lay back and watched the ceiling spin. This was better than the best Ecstasy ever. Not only did nothing hurt, but all the things that should hurt felt good, and the more they should be hurting, the better they actually felt. She reached down and pressed on her steel-riddled pussy and euphoria washed through her hips.

“Don’t do that,” Kane said with a sigh.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“It will.”

She pressed down again covertly.

Kane stood up and Raven put her hands behind her head fast and pretended to be utterly absorbed by the ceiling. The whirling state of her brain made that easy and perfectly plausible. Kane came to the foot of the bed and folded his arms, watching her. She was able to lie quiet for a few seconds. Then she just had to raise her foot and poke him in the thigh.

He looked down and raised an eyebrow at her toes.

She giggled again and then sat up suddenly. “Let’s fuck!” she said happily.

He lifted his head, both brows raised now. “Maybe I will give you more of that,” he remarked.

“Yeah, give it to me, stud.” She got on her hands and knees and prowled towards him. “Because I want you in me.”

“I’m not fucking you,” he said mildly, but he made no effort to chase her hands away as she tugged his pants open. “I just put you together the way I want. I’m not touching you until you’re healed.”

“Mm.” Raven, inexplicably transfixed by Kane’s stomach, suddenly leaned in and bit him right above the base of his thick cock.

Kane sucked in breath and jumped back, banging into the table and nearly knocking his computer over. He stared at her for a second and then came back to the bed and plunged his hands into her hair, pulling her to him.

Raven nibbled at his stomach comfortably, letting his stiffening cock push at her breasts for now. But Kane didn’t seem to mind her toothy mood; he groaned as she worked her way around his abdomen, guiding her to the places he thought she was ignoring, until the marks of her teeth pocked his lower torso. She’d never felt anything sexier than the resistance of his flesh and muscle under her jaws. Raven reached down and rubbed at herself as she scraped her teeth across his thigh, writhing against her hand with delicious bliss.