I Was An Alien Cat Toy by Ann Somerville

Author:Ann Somerville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance, interspecies, mm, science fiction

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Chapter 4

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Temin’s knees knocked as he walked out of the house with Gredar, and for once, he had no problem

with Gredar lifting him up and carrying him. He didn’t need to speak a word of day-neh to know Gredar’s

sister was seriously angry with her brother—or to know it was because of him. The court thing seemed to

have made things worse—was she a friend of Filwui’s? She was Buhi’s mother but Temin could have sworn

she’d been pissed at the little bastard too—and she’d been so gentle with him while he’d been so ill. What

had changed? And how could he find out? He needed more vocabulary.

It was much colder today, and even huddled against Gredar’s fur, he was feeling it—as if he needed

another reminder how unsuited he was for survival in this landscape. By the time they got to Martek’s house,

all the other end of the village, Temin was miserable—frozen to the bone, still coming down from the terror

of seeing J’len just about ready to rip someone’s throat out, and despairing of ever having something

resembling a normal life again. He didn’t usually feel this crappy after a night of good sex.

Martek greeted them enthusiastically at the door of his house. Temin was used to him by now, but he

was still jittery enough that the older male’s loud cries made him want to cringe, and Gredar look at Temin

anxiously. Temin was sick of saying ‘Temin good’ when he wanted to let fly with some decent explanation,

so he just shrugged. Martek bustled into his front room and didn’t notice anything was wrong.

Temin couldn’t help the clench of anxiety in his gut as Gredar said goodbye to them both, but the

problem with faking a smile was that he wasn’t sure Gredar couldn’t just smell the terror on him. The big guy

was way too intuitive about Temin’s feelings, so either he had to be getting a non-verbal clue from somewhere, or the day-neh had secret powers of telepathy. Which he doubted, so smell was the most likely

thing.

Gredar left with just a quick reassuring pat. Martek wanted to get to work immediately, and an hour

later, Temin understood why. It turned out he was the local teacher as well. Ten young day-neh of varying

ages turned up and Temin was taken to a smaller library room. He got a lot of looks and pointing fingers,

before he was left on his own to explore. Easier said than done when so much was stored well above his

reach, but Martek had said he could look at any of the books he wanted. He detached the imager from the

handheld, and went hunting.

It took him nearly an hour, but in the end, it was surprisingly easy to find, once he’d worked out

Martek’s record system was generational. Then it was just a matter of counting back along the tooled leather

spines of the fat books—he thought it was kind of ironic that a civilisation that could make paper so durable

that it could last hundreds of years without yellowing, and so thin that a thousand pages were no more than

two centimetres thick, had never got around to inventing cloth of any kind.

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