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“Oh! Oh. That. Yes,” Fallon stammered. “Ha! That is simply… That is simply a Zabrian form of greeting!”
“Silar’s certainly never greeted me like that,” I said suspiciously.
“Well… Of course, it is a greeting between males!”
“Huh… So why didn’t the warden greet him like that on our wedding day?”
“Ha! Well. You see… The warden is… Silar… He… Are those sausages?”
I pushed a plate across the table to him. Before I could ask the big, brawny, orange Zabrian anything else, a strong hand closed around my arm and propelled me out of the kitchen and into the bedroom.
“Hey!” I said, trying to wiggle out of Silar’s stony hold. Which I should have known was an exercise in futility. But hey. They say exercise is good for you. So I did it anyway.
Silar slammed the door shut with his tail.
“I don’t know what is going on with you and Fallon,” I said, yanking hard at his grip. “But that doesn’t mean you can just shove me in here and-”
My words evaporated into a gurgling puff of air as Silar suddenly released me, only to crush me against his chest in the longest, most desperate hug I’d ever experienced.
“Si… Silar?” I said on a craggy exhale. It was hard to speak. The man was holding me like he was trying to pop my lungs like balloons.
And suddenly, all that work I’d done in the quiet kitchen to get my nerves under control and present a calm exterior was gone.
Poof. Just like that.
The tears came fast and furious, hot, salty rivers that doused Silar’s bare chest. When the moisture touched his skin, he jolted and shoved me away.
That only made me feel worse. I tried to hide my face and wipe my tears, but Silar caught my wrists in his hands and held them in the air, lowering his face to mine and scanning me with wild, white eyes.
“Is this blood?”
“What?”
“All this… this…” He let go of one wrist to cup my cheek, rubbing salty moisture beneath his thumb.
“It’s not blood,” I told him, sniffing miserably. “They’re tears.”
“Teeeeerz. That does not translate. Teerz.” He straightened, looking a little more composed now, his hard jaw set with determination. It was as if, now that he knew the word for the apparently-human phenomenon of tears, he could make a plan on how to tackle the problem.
And apparently that plan involved ripping the pillow off the bed. Then the blanket. Then over-turning the entire mattress.
“What are you doing, Silar?”
“I am looking for the book.”
“The… Oh. The human sex book?”
“Yes. The… What?” He cast me a mystified glance over a tense shoulder.
“Right. You haven’t gotten to those pages yet.” Welp. At least I was so embarrassed now that I’d stopped crying. “I put it in the drawer.”
He made a Silar sort of noise, halfway between a growl and a grunt, that I chose to interpret as grateful. He slammed open the drawer and started thumbing through the pages of the book before chucking it right back down, frustration clear on his face.
“What do the teerz mean, and how do I heal them?”
“Heal them?”
His tail lashed the floor, leaving a streak of dark blood on the boards.
