Because she wasn’t a slave. She was still her own person, or she would be, if Tagen weren’t here.

Tagen began to wonder uncomfortably if he was seeing her more as a female than as a human just because she wasn’t the sort of human he was used to dealing with. There was a complication he didn’t need, particularly with the temperature as high as it had been. He made several trips up and down the stairs, grimly determined not to examine that too closely.

“Oh, and look! Dan’s clothes.”

Tagen paused in the act of collecting dishes and looked at her. Her voice had started out exclamatory but had slipped down into something wistful and sad. She was looking into a box now, her expression difficult to read. He could see folds of fabric beneath her hands, but she didn’t seem to be searching through them, merely holding them.

The sense of her as female grew even stronger, for all that she looked so alien to his eyes, and he was loathe to interrupt her, or even to be here as her witness. Her hand crept up and lay along the left plane of her cheek. She stared into the box, and the single eye that Tagen could see was unfocused.

Tagen forced his gaze down to the dishes scattered atop the crates. He added another one to the stack in his arms.

“I hate this room,” Daria said.

He said nothing.

She picked up the box of folded fabric and put it on his bed. “If there’s anything in there that fits you, you’re welcome to it,” she said. She bent, picked up the low table that had been beneath that box, and carried it away without another word.

Tagen did not watch her go, but once she had vanished down the stairwell, he straightened and looked after her. Some dark emotion sat like a stone in his stomach and would not be moved. So short a time ago, he had sat comfortably in her kitchen and thought he knew what it felt like to have a slave. Now he realized that he was brutally close to making one. There was something very wrong with his human, and his presence here alone was only making it worse.

He should leave. He doubted, unreasonably but intensely, that the human would report his arrival here to anyone. He should leave now and find himself another. If he stayed, there was a very good chance that his time here would end with her mind broken.

Tagen picked up another dish. And then another.

There were no guarantees in life. Earth was hot and its terrain was rough. A single human in a house in the middle of nowhere was the very best that Tagen could have hoped for. He’d never find another so perfect to his needs. Lindaria Cleavon would just have to endure.

He wasn’t going anywhere.

*

Daria arranged the coffee table in front of the sofa and tried not to think too hard about how it made her feel to see it again. She still remembered Dan bringing it home. Garage sale. Two bucks and could she believe it? Yes, she could, actually. It had been such an ugly little thing, beat up and badly-painted, with a loose leg. But Dan had insisted it would be perfect in her living room, it just needed a little love.

He sanded it for three days. Once with the machine, and the other two days by hand, sitting in the grass under the summer sun and stroking long and slow as the shadows lengthened. She’d thought he looked so sexy, flecked with sawdust and muscles rippling, all his attention on his work. And he was right, once it was properly stained and had a few coats of varnish, it was a thing of beauty. Pure beauty. It was the first thing she’d taken upstairs, the thing that hurt the most to have to sit and see every day when it finally sank in all the way that he wasn’t coming home.

But the living room looked better with a coffee table in it, and at least now her alien would have something to put his feet on while he was wearing Dan’s clothes and watching Dan’s favorite show.

Maybe she was wrong about the whole alien-angle. Maybe she’d really died and then gone to Hell. She didn’t think she’d been a very bad person in life, but she hadn’t done too much church-going, and so now she was in Hell and instead of being disemboweled by pitchforks for all eternity, she was being forced to watch a complete stranger slowly usurp the void Dan had left in her life.

It wasn’t that it hurt so much just to think of Tagen in Dan’s old sweats. What hurt was the fact that it didn’t hurt. For six years, she’d been living with all his stuff in his old study, shut away where she didn’t have to look at it because she knew it would be too painful to bear. Now she had another man living in there, and the ugliest thing about it was that somehow, somewhen, somewhere, she’d gotten over it anyway and hadn’t even noticed.

The thought was physically nauseating. She turned her back on the coffee table and went down the hall to make a pitcher of iced tea. It was going to be another scorcher. She didn’t know how her alien could stand to wear long sleeves.

As she was measuring out tea bags, Tagen came into the room with an armload of plates and bowls. “We are not alone,” he said.

Her thoughts were still in extraterrestrial places; his statement hit her with more significance than she thought he really intended. Warily, she said, “We’re not?”

The doorbell rang.

“Oh. The grocery guy.” She drew a centering breath and moved resolutely for the door. “This’ll just take a minute.”

He nodded once and followed her, taking up position next to the sofa and clasping his hands behind his back. He looked like the poster boy for the At-Ease command.

Daria opened her door and there was Troy, the delivery boy from G.O.D.—Groceries On Demand—standing on her porch with the invoice in his hand. He smiled at her and gave her the same sly wink he always did, but somehow, it was impossible to feel the same queasy discomfort when she had something like Tagen to worry about at the same time.

“Hey, Mizz C. Looking good.” He held out the clipboard and his gaze skipped over to Tagen. For a moment, he looked utterly thrown. Then he looked back at Daria with a knowing grin. “Say hey!”

“He’s my cousin,” Daria blurted, and was instantly annoyed with herself. She could feel her blush fanning out from her cheeks and down her neck. She couldn’t even see the signature she put on the bottom of the invoice. “Just put it in the kitchen, please,” she said in what she hoped was a frosty tone and what she feared was a nervous one.

“Sure.” To her supreme irritation, Troy tipped Tagen a wink before going back out to the delivery van.

Tagen watched him go and then slid his eyes toward Daria.

“What?” she snapped.

Tagen said nothing. He moved past her and went upstairs.

Fine. Better with him completely out of the way, anyway. Daria waited by the door for Troy to come back with his handcart full of groceries, already keyed up to damned near the verge of tears and hating herself for it.

Troy glanced into the empty living room as he hupped the cart over the threshold and grinned. “Your cousin doesn’t say much, does he?”

“I guess not.” Daria went ahead of him to the kitchen.

“Wow, look at all this junk.” Troy gave the cluttered countertops a cheerful once-over. “I never seen it look so messy in here before.”

Daria immediately started putting dishes away.

“How long is your cousin gonna be staying?” His tone was casual, but he didn’t even try to disguise the direction of his eyes as he looked her legs up and down. Troy had been delivering her groceries for six months now, and he’d been coming on to her a little stronger every time. There was a certain smirk he used each time he looked her in the face, a smirk that said he knew damned well he was G.O.D.‘s gift to lonely women. “I mean, I don’t see a car outside, so—”

“A few days.” She picked up cans and bottles from the counter and packed them into the cupboard without looking at them. She avoided reaching up too high. She wasn’t wearing a bra.