How to Marry an Alien (13 page)

"He could always join us! Double date fun!"
Riley practically yelled.

I swirled my cereal in the bowl. "I haven't
talked to Ace yet this morning. Not sure if anything is going
on."

No matter how much Riley had changed, I still
had no desire to go to the bowling alley with her and I was afraid
of what Ace had planned with hooking Monte and Lucy up.

"I'm sure if you would rather hang out with
him than us, Riley will live." Lucy elbowed me in the side.

"No, I will not. What am I going to do
without my second girlfriend?" Riley laughed.

"I'm sure you'll survive." Lucy looked over
at Riley and placed her hand on top of hers. Everything they did
always seemed so intimate, like I was interrupting a private
moment.

"I do have to do some research in the lab
this afternoon, so I guess I can make it a few hours if you all
have something planned." Riley let out a big sarcastic sigh.

"Maybe we can catch a movie or head out to a
mall. There are a few of them within driving distance. What do you
say, Alex?" Lucy looked over at me again, her hand still on
Riley's.

"Whatever, I'm fine with anything." I took a
big spoonful of cereal and popped it in my mouth. I didn't care so
much about an afternoon without Riley, but I wondered what Ace
would have planned if he knew that Lucy was without her.

There was only one mall within about an hour
of my house back in Winnebago. From campus there were at least five
of them, including strip malls, so I couldn't resist it when Lucy
offered me a study break to go shopping.

I texted Ace to say we would be shopping if
he wanted to hang out later, but wasn't expecting anything to come
of it. Lucy dragged me into a few different stores and made me
smell every soy candle she could find. After a few sneezing fits
she gave up on trying to make me smell everything and we window
shopped for awhile.

"So where should we go next? Want to go try
on prom dresses and take pictures to post online?" Lucy wiggled her
eyebrows.

Last time I went dress shopping with a friend
was Simone, at least I thought we were friends. When someone tries
to kill me, usually that takes out the friendship aspect. I wasn't
in the mood to go through that experience again.

"Naw, not in the mood to squeeze these hips
into something that is made just for the mannequin," I said.

"I hear you there." Lucy smiled with a little
skip in her step. "Try being the girl with the big nose and ears. I
can never find hats to fit over my elf ears, and when I do, it just
makes my nose stick out even more."

I shook my head. "Oh please, your nose and
ears aren't that bad."

Lucy laughed. "I'm just lucky I'm dating a
girl that is into elves."

"So speaking of Riley, how did you two start
dating if neither of you had actually ever dated a girl before?" I
asked. I didn't know if I stepped a boundary, but figured I should
put it out there.

Lucy shrugged. "It just kind of happened. I
don't know. We started out as friends, even though I always felt I
had a hint of an attraction to her. Then the more we talked and the
more we spent time together it just grew into something more."

That was the same way it started out with
Ace. I was always attracted to him. Who wouldn't be attracted to
someone who saved their life? But we were just friends and
co-workers until I realized that maybe my feelings were something
more and his ended up being the same.

"And now you are like your own little married
couple, getting breakfast together in the dining hall and knitting
each other purses." I nodded my head in the direction of her giant
pink purse. Riley told me their new hobby was going to stitch and
bitch classes and knitting things for each other. They were too
cute.

"Yeah, if society would even let us get
married. It sucks, you know? All these things about our way of life
ruining the institution of marriage, but really, what could it
hurt? Two more people who love each other and want to spend the
rest of their lives together displaying it for the entire world to
see. Man, it just gets me how much people resent us for
dating."

I knew exactly what she meant, whether she
knew it or not. Dating an alien was hard enough, but that was
mostly secluded from the human world. I couldn't imagine what it
would be like if everyone was against us.

"Alex, is that you?"

Oh God. I recognized that cocky voice.
No,
no, please don’t let it be him
. I looked away from Riley and
saw Monte and Ace walking toward us.
Crap
, it was that
voice.

"Oh, hey, Monte, hey, Ace." I waved until
they stopped in front of us.

"Fancy running into you here." Monte put on
his cockeyed grin, the one that made every single girl I ever knew
fawn over him. I was not impressed and hopefully Lucy wouldn't be
either. I knew she played for the other team, but Monte was a
persuasive guy when he wanted something. All Caltian men were.

"Huh, well, I did tell Ace I would be here,
but I expected he would take that as a chance to do some work." I
shot a glare in Ace's direction.

He either didn't notice or didn't care.
Instead he stepped next to me and took my hand in his while Monte
sauntered to the other side of Lucy.

"Monte and I thought we might just want to
get out for a little while and this seemed like the place to be."
Ace squeezed my hand. He was going to be in so much trouble. I knew
he hated shopping worse than he hated aliens from Venus. This had
to be Monte's plan to try and get to Lucy.

"But I don’t believe we have met, beautiful."
Monte held out his hand, wrapping his fingers around Lucy's
extended one. "I am Monte, Ace's friend."

"I’m Lucy, Alex's roommate," Lucy replied
before quickly pulling her hand away and burying it in the pocket
of her jean shorts. I wished I would have forced her to wear
something more matronly. In her tank top and short shorts, I knew
Monte couldn't help but let his dark eyes trail to every part of
her. He had the creeper stare down to a science.

"Alex, you never told me your roommate was
this gorgeous. Where have you been hiding her all this time?" Monte
didn't even look at me, just kept his eyes locked on Lucy.

"I've got to protect the girl somehow," I
gritted through my teeth.

Ace bumped my hip with our intertwined hands.
"Be nice," he whispered.

I rolled my eyes, but no one even noticed.
Lucy was actually looking up and smiling at Monte. This couldn't be
good.

"You don't mind if we join you ladies for a
bit, do you?" Monte's voice oozed with confidence. He probably
thought it was in the bag.

"No, of course not." Lucy shook her head.
"I'm sure Alex wouldn't mind spending some with Ace."

"Does this mean you would like to spend some
time with me as well?" Monte leaned his head in toward Lucy.

He towered over her. Like every Caltian man
he was really tall and well built like a Grecian statue. If I
didn't think he was such a jerk I might have actually found him
attractive with his spiky black hair and prominent jaw line. But I
had my own Caltian, who was even sexier and had the personality to
match. Unlike creeper Monte.

Lucy shrugged, pulling two hair ties out of
her bag and pulling her hair into two tiny pigtails. "Sure, why
not?"

Monte raised his hand up, his fingers sliding
through her hair and then down her jaw. "I like these. They suite
you."

Ugh, creeper alert. But Lucy just giggled.
Not good, not good. I didn't know why I agreed to let Monte put the
moves on Lucy. Maybe because I didn't think it would actually work,
or because at the time I was desperate to get rid of Riley. Now I
realized that Riley wasn't actually as bad as I thought she was and
maybe I even judged the former intern badly…even if she did try to
kill me.

We picked our path back up through the strip
mall. Lucy and Monte went on talking like they were old friends and
maybe even a hint of flirting. Lucy kept laughing at Monte's cheesy
pick up lines, and on more than one occasion, I saw him put his arm
around her shoulders.

"I almost jumped when Ace put his lips to my
ear and whispered, "It looks like Monte's plan is going quite
smoothly.

"Yeah," I grumbled, looking up at him. "Looks
like it."

Ace cocked his head to the side like a
confused puppy. "Something wrong? I thought this was what you
wanted."

"I never said this was what I wanted. I just
said I was worried about having Riley around," I said as quietly as
I could, hoping Lucy wouldn't hear me.

She was too enamored in her conversation with
Monte to notice anything. We hadn't stopped in a store the entire
time we had been there. All we did was walk around while Monte and
she flirted, and I stared like a jealous lover.

"Alex." Ace cupped my chin in his hand and
turned my face toward him. "There is something that you are not
telling me. Are you not pleased with this arrangement?" He dropped
his hand back to the side.

I let out a deep puff of air. "I thought I
was, but just seeing them together after spending so much time with
Riley and Lucy…it just doesn't seem like that good of an idea."

"Maybe you were wrong about Lucy and Riley.
Maybe this two women thing you spoke of so highly really isn't
real." Ace said it like it was a fact he just read out of a text
book.

"I don't understand how you can be so dense
about this subject. Lucy and Riley have a relationship that is
similar to ours. People don't understand it and so many are against
them being together just because it's different than what they are
used to."

I looked around before focusing my attention
back to Ace. "They are just like us, except for the whole evil
people trying to kill us. They have to fight for acceptance and
maybe someday they'll be as lucky as we have, and at least, be
tolerated."

Ace smiled before it disappeared in my lips,
a kiss that reached through me that was much too passionate for a
public area. He then pulled back, his endless dark pools of black
staring into my eyes. "I love it when you are so passionate about
something. It makes me fall for you all over again."

We got back to the room after finally prying
Monte's grabby hands off Lucy. I was so embarrassed I just wanted
to run and hide. I couldn't believe that I ever agreed to let Monte
go after her. Now all of her passion about being with Riley and
giving up her false life of dating boys was gone, and she turned
into a giggling school girl with a crush.

"Sorry about Monte and Ace showing up. I told
him we were going shopping, but I didn't think he would actually
show up there." I threw my purse on the bed. We never actually made
it into any stores once the guys arrived, so I didn't have a single
bag to show for our three-hour shopping trip.

"You need to stop apologizing. They're cool
guys. That Monte guy is really into the same books as me, so we had
a nice conversation," Lucy said before she sat down on her bed and
pulled her phone out of her purse.

"You aren't thinking of leaving Riley to go
after him are you?" I asked.

Lucy burst into a fit of laughter, setting
her phone down and grabbing her stomach for a moment until she
gasped for air a few times and could speak again. "Are you
serious?"

I sat down on my bed, breathing a sigh of
relief. "Yeah, it looked like you two were really getting cozy
today."

"Obviously you haven't met too many gay
people. Just because one guy flirts with me doesn't mean I'm going
to leave my girlfriend for him. I care about Riley way too much to
just give her up for some guy with a passion for young adult
vampire novels." She picked her phone up and typed away at the
screen.

"So what you're telling me is that you aren't
going to leave Riley and run away with Monte?"

Lucy rolled her eyes, setting her phone down
next to her. "Please. I'm gay. There is no way that I would leave
my wonderful girlfriend for something with a penis."

"Well, good, I'm glad. I mean, glad that
you're happy with your girlfriend," I stuttered.

Lucy stood back up, tossing her purse over
her shoulder. "And on that note, my lovely girlfriend is done with
her research, so I'm going to meet her at the Union. Do you want to
come with? We could do another triple date."

"Naw." I waved my hand out. "You go ahead.
I'll let you two have some girlfriend time without me."

"Trust me; I can use it after being
surrounded by two male models all afternoon." She smiled and turned
to the door. "I'll see you later tonight. Make sure to put a sock
on the door if I shouldn't come in," she called before leaving the
room.

There was only so much homework a girl can do
on a Saturday night before it's time to get away. Since I was
lacking a car and the only way I could get to Circe was if someone
picked me up, I figured a trip to Circe would be a good reason to
spend time with my dad and for him to take me out to dinner.

We pulled into a small diner not far from
campus. It looked like something out of the 1950's with a silver
awning, and I could make out a checkered floor with red, vinyl
booths at each window.

"I thought you might want to try out a place
with a little nostalgia," dad said as we walked into the
restaurant.

We sat at a booth near the window, watching
the sun graze the mountain tops before it made its final decent
into nightfall. I might have missed the cornfields of Illinois, but
there was something so beautiful about watching the sunset over the
mountains. Ace always told me how beautiful it was when the sun set
and rose over Calta, but I couldn't imagine anything more beautiful
than the desert's.