Page 64 of Wanted By the Alien Warden

“What? No!” he said fiercely. “I’m cutting the branches. Many of the brambles will remain in your hair, but we can deal with that after.”

We, he’d said.We can deal with that.

He was going to help me. With something as small and stupid as a bunch of brambles caught in my hair, due entirely to my own clumsiness. He’d laughed at me for a moment, sure. But there had been no malice in it. Only warmth, underpinned by the certainty that he would get me out of this eventually.

How depressing would it be, I wondered to myself, if I admitted that Tenn is probably my best friend?

It was too pathetic to even put into words. Especially when I dared acknowledge just how beyond friendly most of my feelings were for him these days.

I stayed still, just as he’d told me to, letting his scent and the warmth of the sun bathe me. Closing my eyes, I gave in to the physical sensations: his chest brushing mine, the gentle tugs at my scalp as he freed my tangled strands, the occasionalstroke of a knuckle or thumb against my ears or throat. Leaves and brambles rustled gently around us as the knife snapped and sliced easily through their branches.

“There.”

I opened my eyes, slightly disoriented, like I’d been under some sort of spell.

“All done?” I asked.

“All done.”

Gingerly, I tried moving my head. There was no resistance.

“Thank you,” I said. I felt my head with my right hand, wincing as I encountered dozens of tangles and spiky brambles in my hair.

“Come out of there, would you?” Tenn cajoled. “Or you’re going to get snagged again and ruin all of my hard work.”

“The hard work hasn’t even happened yet,” I told him with a sigh as I got to my feet and carefully stepped out of the brambly mess. “I still have to fix all this,” I said, waving my hand around my head, “and I don’t even have a comb.”

“I have a comb.”

“Oh! You do?”

“Of course I do. You think I don’t comb my hair? I’m not Silar.”

“Well, I don’t know! I’ve never seen you use it. Can I please borrow it?”

“No.”

For fuck’s sake.

“Why not?” I asked, barely restraining myself from stomping my foot like a two-year-old. “Why would you bother telling me you have a comb if you weren’t planning on letting me borrow it?”

“Because lending it to you would be useless,” he said in a maddeningly statement-of-fact tone. “You can’t see what’s going on back there.”

“So, what, exactly, do you propose?” I asked him as we returned to the area of our camp.

“I propose,” he said, sitting down on a fallen log near the tent and indicating the place between his thick thighs, “that you sit down, be good, and let me do it for you.”

Be good.

God, how I wanted to be good for him.

Too much. Way too fucking much.

“Fine,” I muttered, hoping I sounded more belligerent than obedient. “Where’s the comb?”

But Tenn’s tail was already way ahead of me. His tail seized upon his pack and dragged it over to where he was sitting on the log. He started rifling through it, and when his hand emerged, his knife had been put away. In its place was a beautiful wide-tooth comb made of some kind of shiny white material, shot through with streaks of gold. It reminded me of Old-Earth marble, or opal.

“That’s a beautiful comb,” I said, sitting down between Tenn’s legs on the warm grass.

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