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“It is not bigger than I thought it would be,” he said in a gruff, I told you so sort of way. “Your hand is exactly as small around its handle as I knew it would be.”
“Oh, yeah? What, you spend a lot of time looking at my hands or something?”
He held my gaze silently for a moment before his sight stars slid back to his vakta without answering. Something went a little funny and twisty low in my belly, but I ignored it, focusing on the task at hand. Dalk had finally gotten off his high horse, or, erm, high irkdu, and let me have a knife. The last thing I needed now was to prove him right by fucking things up.
Luckily, I didn’t run into any problems with his knife. I got my vakta opened up and scooped-out, and with such a simple design, I had it carved in no time. Once finished, I let my gaze wander around the hall. Zakkar and Oxriel were both at the carving stage, and I smirked at the intense look of concentration on Oxriel’s normally smiley face. Gahn Taliok’s representative Ox was so focused that the three tips of his tongues were poking out, his brows knitted together over his eyes. Gahn Errok’s right-hand-man Zakkar was a little more relaxed, and he often stopped working to chat with Tilly. Nasrin was still on the design/painting stage of her vakta, and Kohka was working away on his without speaking to anyone else.
Priya and Stephanie had, like me, taken the lazy girl way out and had done simple triangle designs, so they were done. Both were now absorbed in supervising their mates’ work. Errok and Lerokan were both still painting their designs on the vakta plants with feathers and ink, and I couldn’t help but get the vibe that each brother was trying to outdo the other. Those two were the whole reason there was even a contest in the first place, after all. Each brother, when he thought the other wasn’t looking, would peek over at his competition with a stiff frown on his face. It was actually pretty hilarious, considering how alike they looked. Like fearsome mirror images of each other, their indigo brows taut with tension over moonlight-coloured sight stars.
“I am ready to carve my pumm-kin,” Errok proclaimed suddenly, as if giving some royal decree that we all needed to heed. With that, he snatched a blade from his back with a confident sweep of his arm, brought it to the vakta’s surface...
And promptly sliced right through the entire thing.
I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud at the look of pure fucking venom that darkened his features. Steph was struggling, too. She bit down hard on her lips, but I could see the laughter in her eyes as Errok fumed.
“I require a new pumm-kin!” Errok snapped, his tail thwapping behind him on the stone. “Mine is defective.”
“Perhaps it is not the pumm-kin that is defective, brother,” Lerokan offered cheerfully. “Besides, there was nothing in the contest rules about second chance pumm-kins. You must work with what you have.”
“I will not put up with this,” Errok seethed. “I am Gahn and I demand another pumm-kin to replace this weak, pathetic one. Whoever chose this one for me must have been trying to sabotage me in the contest.”
“You chose it yourself,” Stephanie reminded him helpfully, not bothering to fight her grin now. “Remember? You made a big fuss about the Gahn getting first pick.”
“I would not have picked this pathetic pumm-kin,” Errok insisted. “Someone must have swapped my real one out. In fact, that one you have looks very familiar, brother.” The tone of his voice on that last word wasn’t brotherly at all, and I kind of hoped Lerokan would run for his life at that moment. But Lerokan just grinned, fangs flashing, while Priya rolled her eyes.
“I had no need to steal your pumm-kin when mine was already the finest of the lot,” Lerokan said. As if to demonstrate the superiority of his vakta choice, he grasped a blade from his back, brought it down....
And sliced through the whole thing, just like Errok did.
I cackled, and none of the other human girls could hold their laughter back now either. Errok glared with smug satisfaction at Lerokan’s ruined vakta, while Lerokan stared blankly ahead as if questioning every choice he’d ever made in life. Finally, in a toneless voice, the younger brother said, “It appears I, too, will require a new pumm-kin.”
Still chuckling, I turned back to Dalk.
“How about you? Is yours defective as well?”
Dalk didn’t answer for so long that I thought he’d decided to ignore me. Just when I was about to give up, though, he murmured, “I do not believe so.”
I nodded, impressed, realizing that he’d already scooped out the insides and was slicing through his vakta with careful, precise strokes. He’d obviously learned from the other two dolts over there and had been a lot more careful with his super-sharp knife and bulging alien muscles. That kind of surprised me, to be honest. Dalk had always struck me as a big, beefy, grumpy sort of guy who would be more concerned about how hard he could hit something versus how carefully he could carve it.
I still couldn’t see what his design was, so I settled on watching him as he carved. Muscles flexed under bronze and black skin, forearms and biceps and trapezius muscles flickering with every movement of his blade against the vakta’s blue side.
“Why are you watching me?”
I was so absorbed in watching Dalk’s hands and arms that it took me a second to realize he was the one who’d spoken.
“How do you know I’m watching you?” I said, crossing my arms and frowning at the top of his dark head. “You haven’t looked up from that thing once in the past five minutes.”
“I do not know what a minute is,” he grumbled, still not looking up, “but it doesn’t matter. I can feel your eyes on me.”
“Well, it’s your first time, and we’ve already established I’m the expert. I need to supervise you,” I stammered, feeling a hot flush creep up my cheeks. There was absolutely no reason to be embarrassed or shaken up by what he’d just said. Who cared if I’d been watching him? He was a goddamn alien carving a blue pumpkin, that sure as shit was something worth watching in my books!
He made an unsatisfied hmmph sort of sound in the back of his throat. After a moment of beyond-awkward silence, I sighed and said, “Will you let me see your carving yet?”
“No,” he said decisively, without a moment’s hesitation. “It is not finished.”
“Fine,” I groaned. “Well, whatever you’re working on, I hope you know it can’t compete with my awesomeness over here. Like, just look at this!” I said jokingly, gesturing at my simple design.
Dalk’s eyes flicked up to me, my pumpkin, then down to his again.
