Tagen returned to the sofa and the tee-vee. The humans had changed positions, and now the female was bent over the end of the bed, on her knees. The male was caressing her, preparing to enter. Tagen drummed his claws on the side of the sofa, waiting.

The female gasped when the male finally got around to penetrating. Just gasped. Gods. But he was riding earnestly enough, his hips slapping the female’s hocks, making them judder and ripple. Her breasts, Tagen noted, scarcely moved at all. He wondered if it were customary for humans to mate this way, like beasts. Jotan did not. Although their reproductive organs were in very near the same place, it was not quite near enough for a female to be comfortably mounted from behind. But the humans seemed to enjoy it. He wondered, would Daria—?

Why did his mind keep returning to her? How she mated was no concern of his. And the gods knew, she was not about to extend him an offer. Her eyes were on him always, and although she made an effort to converse with him and adjust to him, there was a fear in her, deeply-rooted. It was not the fear of rape, precisely. Tagen had had all too many occasions to see that look in the eyes of recovered slaves. It was the fear of all of him—his size, his power, his eyes, his voice, and yes, his maleness. At the same time, it was a fear that had nothing at all to do with him, one that almost certainly existed before he had ever come into her home and would continue to exist long after he left.

And what of her in his mind? Why not explore that, since she was sleeping soundly in her chamber and he was here watching humans mate. Did he think her attractive?

He didn’t know, having never thought of humans to that purpose. Humans and Jotan were alike in so many ways, and yet, this Daria Cleavon was very different from what he considered an ideal female form. All the same, for all her feminine similarities, he could not quite imagine that body beneath his. She was so small, so slender, so rounded in so many strangely arousing places.

Her face he found fair. Delicate as spun glass, and yes, beautiful in an eerie, human way. The white markings that made half a mask of it threatened every time he saw it to erase the line between the exotic and the erotic. Her eyes, green and blue, floating in a sea of white, were so clear and guileless, open windows to the very heart of her. Her lips, full and pink and gently bowed, were an easy thing to watch as he tried to puzzle out her words.

Humans used their lips on one another when they wooed. They called it a kiss. He had seen it among the recovered slaves he’d known, and he saw it with even more ardor on the tee-vee. It was what they seemed to do instead of biting, but then, a human’s thin skin could never survive the love-bites of a passionate Jotan, a fact made obvious in the flesh of many of those recovered from raided sex-houses.

Tagen raised a hand absentmindedly and touched his own lips. He watched the humans in the tee-vee perform their endless human kiss and wondered how Daria’s mouth would taste. Kissing was an alien and unknowable thing. What did they do with their teeth when they did it? Or their tongues? Where did noses go? It wasn’t just other’s mouths they sought, either, and that raised the question of what was acceptable and what was not. One could kiss a breast, he saw, or a belly or a throat, but what of a knee? An elbow? The hocks, the ears, the toes?

The humans were now suddenly clothed and talking as they navigated a groundcar. Tagen leaned back into the sofa and folded his arms heavily across his chest, concentrating on their words, determined to make this foray into deviancy as educational as possible. His vocabulary was improving, but not rapidly enough. He knew if he could just talk to Daria, she would be a help to him. She was quick, as quick a mind as any officer of the Fleet. Quicker than most of his colleagues aboard his last tour, in fact. Military minds tended toward efficiency rather than intuition and deduction, which was probably why there were so many like E’Var loose in the universe. Predators such as him never lacked for insight.

“Are you an alien?” Daria had asked him, very nearly her first lucid thought. Not, are you a ghost, are you a demon, are you a hallucination, or are you anything at all supernatural. No, she had made that first leap blindly and made it correctly, despite the fact that Earth’s idea of an alien being was nothing like a Jotan. And despite all the awful fear of him that had been clawing free of her, she had never lost her hold on logic. “Where would I go? Who could I possibly tell about you?” It took a formidable mind to remember such things in the grip of terror.

And it was terror, a truer and rawer form than he had ever seen in the eyes of slaves. It was not merely that she had never known a Jotan. Something was wrong with her, something rooted down deep in her soul and bleeding out slow poison. Something had happened to her that was every bit as bad as being removed from her Earth and enslaved. He didn’t know what and she wasn’t about to tell him, but the truth of it was there and she lived with him despite it. One could not help but admire that.

The male on the tee-vee had abandoned his female and stumbled across two others. They were only talking now, but in that sly-eyed, smoldering way that Tagen strongly suspected would lead to mating very soon. And sure enough, one of the females was undressing. He had been watching this program for half an hour now, and he still had no idea what it was supposed to be about.

‘And now I want to fuck,’ Tagen thought with an inward growl. He switched off the tee-vee and stood up, gathering his damp towel to head upstairs. He was naked and he did not much care. One never knew. Daria might emerge from her room unexpectedly and be overcome with arousal at the sight of him. Or curiosity. Hell, he’d settle for her being overwhelmed with boredom. Humans didn’t seem to need any more reason to mate than Jotan did, and Tagen knew he was a fair-looking male. Probably even by human standards, if the males he saw on the mating programs represented the highest criteria.

She did not emerge.

Tagen waited outside her door in the dark for several minutes, unreasonably irritated with her. Any other time of the day or night, if he’d been unclad and trying to hide it, she’d have found a way to stumble across him and then run screaming from the room to clean her cupboards. Naturally, now that he was of half a mind to be discovered, she was soundly sleeping.

For the best, really. Even by Jotan standards, lurking naked outside a female’s bedroom was a little too aggressive to be properly thought of as flirting. He’d thrown that sly-eyed human male out of this house for far less. Gods, he was turning into a hypocrite as well as a liar. He needed to go to bed. Perhaps it would be cooler in the morning.

Tagen opened Daria’s bedroom door.

In the dark, he could just make out the greenish blobs of the cat’s eyes catching light. It unwrapped itself from the bed and came toward him, miawing. Tagen bent and rubbed its head to shut it up, and it moved past him and out the door, no doubt to visit its food dish and see if a dinner had magically appeared since last it looked. Tagen closed the door behind it, his gaze resting on the bed where Daria lay.

If she opened her eyes right now and saw him standing naked in her doorway, she would burst his eardrums screaming and she’d be right to do so. If this were Jota and she a proper female, she could have him convicted of intended rape on this alone and he would spend the next twenty years imprisoned for it.

This wasn’t Jota. Tagen took a step forward.

‘Stop,’ he told himself suddenly, and his inner voice was neither shocked nor angry, only firm. He stopped, listening to Daria’s even, heavy breaths. His mind’s voice spoke again, calmly, ‘What do you really mean to do when you reach her? Honestly. What?’