I sit and I wait, taking up space in the medical bay, wondering what he has in mind for me. I bet it’s a dress. I haven’t worn a dress in as long as I can remember, and I’m not going to start now, no matter how many alien canes he has at his disposal.
Apparently, the king has decided that he chooses my clothes according to what pleases him most. This is an interesting development. What’s even more interesting is that I’m not just telling him to get fucked and putting my uniform back on.
Ever since I got busted back down to beat cop, it feels like the only thing I’ve worn is that uniform. In between shifts, I’d take it off and just sort of walk around my apartment in my underwear. Sometimes I’d wear pajamas, but that shitty blue-black fabric was the only way I interacted with the outside world.
I guess I’m not a cop anymore, though. I was on my final, final, last, absolutely no more chances warning when all this shit went down. And one of the requisites of being in the LAPD is residing on planet Earth. It’s not regularly enforced, but I’m pretty sure it is technically on the books.
“Here,” he says, returning with a flourish and a garment which sparkles darkly against his, in this lighting, damn near fluorescent green skin. He shakes it out to reveal, not a dress, but a…
“Is that a leotard?”
“Try it on.”
I do try it on, because even a shiny leotard is better than nothing at all. When I pull the fabric over my legs and up over my ass, I feel it snugging to every part of me, sort of pulling me in and tight, like a pair of interstellar spanx. This is far more comfortable than I had imagined it would be. When I am done pulling it up over my shoulders, there’s no zipper. It just sort of slicks into place, as if it knows what its job is and it is prepared to do it.
“It matches your hair,” King Brawn says, referring to the dark mass of wave and curl I usually wrangle into an elastic. “It frames your beautiful face.”
I’ve never been called beautiful before. I mean, I have, but not by someone who wasn’t trying to sleaze their way out of a ticket or citation, or who didn’t have a cop fetish. Guys like the cuffs, what can I say. This guy — king, is different. He makes me feel different. Not like a bitch, or some dominatrix fantasy. He makes me feel smaller, softer, curvier. He makes me feel vulnerable, but in a way I don’t totally hate right now.
“Thank you,” I say. “This is actually pretty nice.”
“It is,” he agrees with that fanged smile.
He is so very alien. There’s not a part of him, from the thick fall of his ultra alien hair, to the hue of his verdant skin which makes him seem human to me. Maybe I like that. Maybe that’s the only reason I’m putting up with all of this.
“Let’s eat,” he says, taking me by the hand and leading me from the medical bay. I follow after him, mostly because I have no choice, but also because I have no say.
“I do not have the food of your planet," he explains, almost apologetically. “But humans basically consume the walls of their existence, so you will not be hard to feed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You eat plants. You eat animals. You eat anything that fits in your mouth and can be made soft enough for your adorable little teeth to chew.”
“Never thought of my teeth as being adorable before.”
“They’re just so relatively soft and minuscule compared to…”
“Okay, I get it,” I interrupt him before he can go off on a tirade about my teeth of all things. “What do you aliens eat, if not the walls of your existences?”
“We consume star rays.”
“Oh. So you mean sunlight? Like a plant does? Like a big daisy?”
Like a big fucking muscular daisy, but I am not going to let him get away with saying I eat walls without some kind of pushback or consequence.
“Yes, like a big daisy, I suppose you could understand it that way, being from a world where only meat walks around.”
So he’s actually a plant. That explains so… actually, that explains absolutely nothing at all. But I’m going to pretend that it does so I can feel a little more comfortable inside my own skull.
“Our biology is very different from yours,” he continues. “And yet we share very many similarities.”
“Plants get their minerals from the ground. Where do you get yours from? And why do you have fangs if you’re not a carnivore?”
“Fangs aren’t designed to eat meat. They’re designed to shred it if the meat belongs to a predator.”