Page 35 of All or Nothing
His brow furrowed in confusion. “The story drawings you were telling me about? The idea is wonderful, but I don’t know what story I would even tell.”
“I can help!” I’d always wanted to try writing a comic. I even had some ideas tucked away, though my ideas notebook was lost to me now, back on Earth somewhere. “Do you ever daydream stories or characters? We can always start with something really vague like that and build it up into a full story.”
He flushed, looking embarrassed, and I wanted to pounce on him, he was so fuckingcute. His tail flicked with embarrassment down by our feet, the tufted tip gently swatting at my shins. “Well, when I imagine stories for comfort, they are usually…fantasies. Romantic fantasies,” he admitted, his whole face flushed bright green now. I bit my lip, resisting the urge to tackle him.
“Romantic stories are great! People love romance, right? Can I ask what sorts of stories you’d make up for these fantasies, or will you set yourself on fire with embarrassment?”
He snorted a laugh, pulling me against his side and burying his face against my neck, hiding. “I like to imagine…that I do something brave, or charming, and it causes a female to see past my ugliness and fall for me anyway.” Oh god, Xollen…jesus this guy was so fucking sweet that he made me want to start screaming and flipping furniture.
I cradled his head against my neck, combing my fingers through his silky hair and scraping my nails against his scalp like he loved. “You are breaking my heart, babe,” I muttered, pressing a kiss to the side of his head. “But I think it’s a great idea for a story. We have a fairy tale back on Earth that kind of goes like that. A prince does something that gets him trapped in an enchanted castle, cursed to be a hideous beast until he can win someone’s love. We call it Beauty and the Beast.”
He pulled away, smiling tentatively down at me. “You think it could be a good story? I’ve always thought it was silly nonsense, just my loneliness getting the better of me.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s great! I’ll start making some notes, and you make some sketches, and then we’ll start hashing it out!” Excitement was thrumming through me now. I had no fucking clue how to make a comic but since no one else had done it yet it wasn’t like I could actually screw it up, right? And the idea of being able to work closely with Xollen, doing something big and creative alongside him, had me feeling warm and fizzy. In fact, that might have been the best part.
He was surprised, one side of his mouth quirked up in a little grin. “You want to start now? With the very first idea we come up with?”
I stood, picking up our abandoned breakfasts. “Hell yeah, babe. It’s a great idea! And it’s not like we have all that much else to do, right? We can keep brainstorming while we unpack, even.”
He trailed after me, helping me clean the bowls and prepare fresh portions in the food synth. “I have to admit, that does sound exciting. I’ve never had someone encourage me to do nothing but art with my life. Even Derris would suggest I do art in my spare time, but still work with my parents. For the stability, and to give me the best chance of attracting a mate, I think.” He wrapped his arms around me from behind, nuzzling into my neck again, while we waited for the food synth to finish up. “But who could have foreseen that someone as beautiful and sweet as you would fall into my arms without any care for wealth or reputation?” He pressed light, fluttering kisses along my throat, making my nipples tighten and heat throb between my thighs. I squeezed them together tight, my hands clutching at his forearms. He nipped at the top of my shoulder, licking the small hurt, and I couldn’t take it anymore; I turned in his arms and threw my arms around his neck, kissing him deeply.
We were never going to eat that cereal.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Settling In
JOSS
EVENTUALLY, WEcame up for air and got ourselves together enough to sit down and eat. Apparently, magic and fairy tales were another Earth special, and it took me a while to get him to wrap his head around the fantasy genre.
“It’s like, if you didn’t know how hover vehicles worked, you might believe that there was a powerful force outside of your knowledge making them fly, right?” I tried.
“But it is a powerful force, it’s an antigrav field. Is this magic a blanket term for ignorance?”
I huffed, trying to figure out a way to explain something like that to a guy who’d grown up in a hyper-advanced alien civilization. “No, it’s like, a force that you can’t study. Sometimes it’s a part of people, sometimes it’s like a force of nature, but it’s made up. Magic isn’t real, and we all kind of know that, but it’s fun to pretend that you can be all-powerful and do whatever you want, like fly or make things appear from nothing.”
He still looked deeply confused. “It isn’t real, and yet you have so much of your culture dedicated to it? Why is this?”
“Because it’sfunXoll!” I laughed. “People on Billieu don’t ever use their imaginations, huh?”
Snorting, Xollen leaned towards me and leveled an annoyed look at me. “We still use our imagination! But we use it for good, to imagine what could be instead of inventing nonsense.”
I laughed again, swatting at his arm. “Excuse you, that sounds totally boring, I prefer the magic!”
For all that he kept insisting it was silly and didn’t make sense, I think the idea intrigued him. Once breakfast was done and cleaned up we went back to unpacking, starting with the kitchen since we were already in it. We settled into an easy rhythm, me opening the boxes and handing what was inside to him, and Xollen putting everything away where he thought it should go, since he cared more about that kind of stuff than I did. While we worked we started spit-balling ideas for our comic.
“I like the idea of freeing a person from a curse, from the fairies tale you were telling me about,” Xollen mused, taking a pair of drinking glasses from me. “What sorts of curses are there?”
“Fairytale,” I corrected him. “Usually curses are punishments for something bad the person who gets cursed did. They’re meant to teach a lesson. So a vain person may be cursed to be ugly, a greedy person to have nothing, stuff like that. Sometimes it’s on more than one person though. In ‘Sleeping Beauty’ an entire castle is punished by a curse because an evil fairy didn’t like something the king and queen did.”
He thought for a second, playing with the fall of silky navy blue hair coming from his high ponytail. “And you said that sometimes people get cursed to be animals, like the frog and the swan?”
I nodded. “Two different stories, but yeah. You got an idea?”
“Perhaps. What about one person who is cursed to only ever say the opposite of what they mean to say, meets someone who is cursed to take any form but their true form, and in order to break the curse they are tasked with getting someone to fall in love with them. Maybe…they team up to try and figure out a way to do it, and accidentally fall in love instead?”
I stood there blinking at him in amazement. I almost dropped the glasses I was holding, I was so stunned. “Oh my god, babe, that sounds so fucking cool!” My mind was already whirling with ideas, symbolism, and metaphors that we could work in, what they could have done to earn their fates…I ran out of the kitchen and snatched my tablet from its charging dock. When I brought it back into the kitchen and immediately started hammering out notes Xollen came over to look at what I was doing. He was quiet, apparently content to just watch me for the long minutes I sat typing at the screen.
