Page 43 of Rizzed Up By My Alien Neighbor
And sometimes, that’s harder to grasp than all the alien confections in the universe.
CHAPTER 11
RYCHNE
Each dawn brings a new jolt.
My heartbeat drifts, beyond my control—like a rupture in my armor. I feel it first as a tremor across my spine, then a spike in my pulse whenever I glimpse Nessa just beyond sight. The perfume clings to the dew, drifting in the breeze—something floral, warm—and it sends shockwaves through my system. Every rational program I’ve constructed to remain detached scatters in the wind.
This is the Jalshagar bond.
A phenomenon sacred to my kind—a thread of soul that ties two destined mates across bloodlines and dimensions, ordained by Precursors themselves. This link manifested the instant our eyes met—moonlight, mismatched pulses, the inevitable inevitability. My entire neural architecture screamed at the contact, flooded with ancestral echoes and emotional resonance.
But I refuse it.
It makes no sense.
She doesn’t belong in any constellation my people have mapped. She isn’t armored for galactic battles or trained in planetary defense. She bleeds red. She ages. She sleeps unprotected—yet somehow, my instincts scream for herprotection more than they’ve ever screamed for comrades in war.
I am a warrior first. Family is a burden I chose to shed. And here I am, turning into something else entirely.
I spend mornings in the basement lab—jarred by those humming replicators, grinding gears, and humming capacitors. I test nanofiber mesh. Calibrate pressure arrays. Build phase variators for shield generation. Pray it’s enough to resurrect the Starfighter’s lost fusion core.
But her image lingers. I taste the tang of her coffee. I can hear her protest when Lipnicky calls. I replay her laughter in my mind as thoroughly as any combat replay from my days aboard the Naret.
So I bury myself in preparations.
The garage vault—I reinforce it with triple-grade armor plating. The basement replicator—I run full diagnostics. Electrical coils flicker in the lamplight, a lattice of potential war. Even the stealth array gets upgraded—sonar dampeners, more precise wavelength filters.
All to distract. All to focus.
But then evening falls, and I walk outside. And she’s there again—at her front porch, hair in a messy bun, worry etched across the lines by her eyes. She checks the mail. She waters her plants. She moves through her world with a fragility that pulls me closer.
This offends my sense of purpose. I am not supposed to be pulled. I am supposed to pull. To dominate. To command.
Instead, I’m learning how to watch. To wait. To want.
Tonight, I pause at my garage door. It’s open, revealing benches littered with gadgets, wires, flux modules. The replicator hums low, casting shadows that dance across the concrete.
I close my eyes and breathe in the evening air—fresh-cut grass, cooking smoke, a hint of something sweet I can’t identify. It isn’t Earth. But it’s part of this planet now.
Another deep inhale.
My pulse hammers.
I need to stay focused. I remind myself: my mission is return. Reliquaries of the star drive must be assembled. The war continues. A thousand dead await justice across time.
But still I feel her side of the sky draw closer, like gravity recalibrating.
Gods of Precursors—why? Why have you woven this into my armor?
I turn from the lab, boots crunching on gravel. I walk to the fence, leaning on it until I can see her yard. She’s already turned in. The porch light is off, her silhouette gone.
I sigh and brush the wood with my hand. I wish I could trace the Jalshagar with my fingers. Feel her presence in a more precise way. Instead, I have this: memories in muscle memory, invisible psychic geography.
My thumb presses to the wood.
Then I leave.
