The Alien in My Kitchen Read online

  “This is terrible!” Jaden muttered.

  “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “The worst part was I didn’t know how to act. I needed to get out of there without showing how upset I was. I pretended I’d been in on it. When I was leaving, Riley looked at me for the first time since we’d done it at his place. His eyes… He was living a lie.”

  Jaden ran a finger over my cheekbone and down to my chin. “You are not living a lie.”

  “No,” I said and I’d never been happier about that than I was as he pressed his closed lips clumsily against mine.

  “Mitchell, you-hoooo! Are you home?”

  “That’s EZ,” I told Jaden. “She has a key, though I guess that’s moot because my door is toast.” And somehow, with everything going on, I’d forgotten the door. I was going to have to rig something up.

  I heard EZ clunking up the stairs and then she was framed in the doorway, tiny, with long brown hair and the tattoo of a butterfly on her exposed collarbone. She looked at me and then Jaden, whom I’d just remembered was completely naked.

  “Mitchell… Oh, my God, what have you done!” she screeched.

  “I didn’t raise him from the dead in one of my experiments, EZ,” I said dryly. She opened her mouth, closed it. “But he’s…”

  Oh, shit. How was I going to explain Jaden?

  Jaden got up, all lean build and silky olive skin. He held out his hand to EZ. “You are Mitchell’s friend.”

  “Um, yeah. Looks like so are you!” she said. “I’m glad you’re not dead.” She glared at me and I knew she was wondering why I hadn’t told her that Jaden was my special naked friend. “Mitch,” she continued. “What the hell happened to your front door?”

  “I was working on something,” I said, which wasn’t altogether a lie. I had been planning on working on something when Jaden had blasted his way into my house.

  EZ grimaced. “Why am I not surprised? And I’m seriously interrupting…” She didn’t blush as she began to retreat, instead checking Jaden out thoroughly. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Wait!” I couldn’t do it. I had no idea how I was going to explain everything, but I couldn’t leave EZ in the dark. She could be a pain in the ass, but she had always, always wanted me to be happy. She was my only family, since the aunt and uncle who’d raised me had been distant and done it only out of obligation. “EZ, Jaden is an alien.”

  EZ blinked. “Like, from Mexico or something?” She gave Jaden a sympathetic look tinged with lust. “That must be tough. I never would have guessed.”

  “No,” I sighed. “Jaden, go get some clothes on.” No way was EZ going to be able to pay attention with Jaden’s gorgeous body on display.

  Jaden frowned. “You and I have much to discuss.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Just…” I got up, went to him. Looking into his eyes, touching that tangled hair, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been as distracted as EZ was now when I’d talked to him earlier. But it had been about comfort, about…intimacy maybe. I had never experienced it, but I thought that was the best word for what we’d shared.

  “I know you probably don’t understand, but nudity is kind of a big deal.”

  “My clothes are damaged and soiled.”

  “Borrow whatever of mine will fit you.”

  “You will be here when I have dressed myself?”

  “Yeah.”

  As soon as he disappeared, EZ hissed, “So, I guess it was a fun joke to pretend you didn’t know Jaden.”

  “I didn’t…” I lifted a hand to hold off an explosion. “Listen, I’m going to tell you everything and you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “Uh-huh.” She still looked hurt.

  “I didn’t know Jaden,” I told her. “Not until he broke through my door this morning.”

  “He broke your door?”

  So I told her everything. She looked incredulous and I flushed, knowing how it sounded. Then I just waited.

  Jaden returned wearing a T-shirt with a Hawaiian flower lei scrawled across the chest. It was tight enough to hug his pecs. It was also wrinkled, since I’d never finished sorting through my laundry, but I think it was clean. He’d snagged some shorts to go with it. My jeans were probably too tight on him.

  He looked at EZ. “Mitchell says I shouldn’t call you an Earthling. He says it’s a cliché.”

  EZ laughed. “Is he for real?” she asked me.

  And just like that she was floating three inches off the floor. Her hair hung down, brushing the hardwood. “Oh, my Goddess!”

  Jaden merely looked on, serenely.

  Then I was floating beside EZ. Like one of those happy dreams you have about flying, like anything is possible. I’d left some of the dark, smudgy stuff from Halloween behind me by opening up to Jaden, so it seemed fitting that suddenly I was weightless.

  EZ grabbed my arms. “Mitchell, you’re not doing this! This is not one of your lame attempts to create anti-gravity.”

  “Nope,” I said. “This is Jaden.”

  Chapter Five

  Something loosened in my chest when Jaden suddenly floated up beside us, all three of us bobbing above the floor. My sexy alien had a goofy side.

  “This is so much fun!” EZ yelled, giggling madly. I laughed with her, maniac best friend laughter as we rolled like puppies in free fall. Jaden watched us and a tiny, awkward smile touched his lips.

  EZ reached out and yanked Jaden closer, into our circle. As soon as she did that, we smacked into the floor. My sides were hurting from laughing so hard.

  Jaden looked embarrassed. “You made me lose my concentration,” he told EZ, looking mildly annoyed.

  “Please,” EZ said. “Guys always blame the woman for that.”

  I grinned when poor Jaden only looked confused.

  EZ’s head was pillowed on my stomach. I threaded fingers through her hair, stroking it. Jaden’s eyes narrowed as he watched us. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was pouting.

  “So, can you, like, take Mitchell flying?” EZ asked in a dreamy voice. “Like Superman and Lois Lane?”

  “You want to fly?” Jaden asked me.

  I laughed again. “Well, yeah, who wouldn’t? But I’ve always envisioned doing that with an anti-gravity device of some kind.” I frowned as I considered my theories.

  “I can take you flying,” Jaden said. “But we have to be…discreet.”

  “Because you’re an alien.”

  “Because I am not the only one of my kind here, Mitchell,” he said, very seriously.

  EZ sat up, hair swinging so it hit my face. I shoved the stuff away and concentrated on Jaden. The rigid way he was sitting was cueing me into the realisation that another of Jaden’s friends being here was not a good thing.

  “You said I was in danger. That you’d come here to be my…protector.” EZ shot me a look and I flushed. Damn it, I was just repeating what Jaden had told me. It wasn’t like I was signing on to give Jaden my balls and stop taking care of myself.

  “The previous attack was on Halloween,” Jaden said.

  “Riley?” My voice gave an embarrassing crack. “He’s an evil alien out to do me in?”

  Jaden shook his head. “Not Riley, but when I mapped the illness in your matrix it originated from that time.”

  “Yeah…” I had been sick since Halloween. It was December now and I’d had this bug on and off for weeks. “I haven’t been able to shake this thing.”

  “You even went to the university clinic for antibiotics after I nagged you about it,” EZ put in, frowning.

  “You’re saying there was more to my flu than…the flu?” I wasn’t scared, I was fascinated.

  EZ rolled her eyes. “You’re a victim of possible germ warfare and you’re enraptured by the scientific possibilities. Typical Mitchell.”

  Jaden nodded. “When I realised you had been ill too long, I had to pour myself into a body so I could speak with you, heal you.”

  “So when Jaden had his accident this morning it was convenient.”<
br />
  “Yes, but also for Jaden. Now his human matrix lives on with me. It was an agreeable arrangement for both of us,” Jaden said.

  “If Riley didn’t give me some kind of sleeper bug, who did?”

  “It could have been anyone at that party you attended, a person taken over by my opponent.”

  I blinked. This was hard to take in. I’d had a crappy romantic experience, but it turned out it could have been a fatal one.

  I could have died.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why does my opponent want you dead?”

  “Yeah, and let’s call him Mr X,” I said. “Just easier to give him a name.”

  Jaden spread his hands. “I told you that you are important to two worlds. In the future, your inventions make it possible for many of my people to become corporeal again if they choose. In return for your technology, we will make contact with Earth, gift your people with cures to diseases, advances in sciences. But you are the key, Mitchell. If you aren’t allowed to grow and develop your gift, it will never happen and our worlds will remain separate, to the detriment of us both.”

  “So this Mr X isn’t down with the idea of having a body again?”

  Jaden nodded. “He believes we are pure as we are, as energy alone. To live in flesh is to degrade our purity.”

  “He sounds like a fanatic,” EZ said. “We have a few of those here on Earth.”

  “So, at the Halloween party, he could have been anyone,” I mulled, trying to get a handle on the situation.

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t do what he did, just take someone over. I mean, you said you’ve been inside me and Jaden in the past, but I wasn’t aware of you.”

  “It is unethical to take over another being,” Jaden said stiffly. “I wanted to know you, but to truly merge I’d need your permission. You haven’t granted it.”

  I remembered how I’d swatted him when he’d tried some kind of soul cleanse. “No, I haven’t, but obviously Mr X doesn’t care about asking for permission.”

  “So he’s like…a creepy shape-shifter!” EZ exclaimed, leaping on the point I’d been about to make.

  “Yes, although I take issue with creepy. I am not creepy,” Jaden said stiffly. “Jaden agreed to our merging. He is braided to my consciousness.”

  “Symbiosis,” I said.

  “Two for one,” EZ said with a smirk. “Hot alien warrior and brooding biker poet all in one very cute body.”

  “I am cute?” Jaden asked. Then, before EZ could restate the obvious, he repeated smugly, “I am cute. I am a cute human.”

  “A cute guy,” EZ coached.

  “A cute guy.”

  “Can we please focus here? We have a shape-shifting fanatical alien on the loose whose goal is to give me the super flu…and, hello, that’s kind of odd, now I think of it,” I said. “Why not just run me over with a car?”

  But Jaden was shaking his head. “He has to be subtle. There are factions among my people. If you die what appears to be a natural death, then he can’t be accused of interference.”

  “Wow, I guess, despite being pure energy beings, you haven’t left politics behind,” EZ said.

  “We have more time for debate since we lack physical bodies.”

  “I guess so, if you can’t even have sex.”

  “Mitchell aided me in experiencing my first climax,” Jaden told her earnestly. “It was very satisfactory. I want him to give me more orgasms very soon.”

  “Um…huh.” EZ’s expression was a little too bland. “How nice of Mitchell.”

  My cheeks burned. “Jaden, you don’t announce stuff like that. It’s…private.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” EZ said. “You can tell me all about it. Anytime. And if you have pictures, that’s a bonus.”

  “EZ! He doesn’t know you’re joking.”

  “Hell, who’s joking?”

  Desperately, I brought us back on topic. “So now you’ve healed me, Jaden, won’t the alien assassin try again?”

  Jaden nodded. “Even I can’t know what face he will wear, not until he attempts to harm you again.”

  “Comforting.”

  “I am your protector. You must submit yourself to me.”

  “I’d rather be your partner,” I said. “I’m not stupid. I know I need help, but I’m at a critical point with two of my experiments and I have to be on campus to monitor one of them.”

  “I must stay with you. Now I have merged with Jaden, I cannot easily leave this body.”

  “Why would you want to?” EZ muttered, but Jaden and I ignored her comment.

  “Okay…” I rubbed my jaw and remembered I had yet to shave, but now I felt like I had the energy to take better care of myself, since that low grade flu was gone. “So maybe Mr X has that same problem of jumping easily into another body, Jaden. He could be in the same one he used on Halloween.” I looked at EZ. “Since you’re the social butterfly on campus, I need you to try to remember who was at the frat party,” I said. “Maybe we can narrow down anyone who might be our guy.”

  “Right, take note if anyone at the party has been acting strange. I’m on it. Why don’t we meet tomorrow for coffee in the science library?” she said, getting to her feet and stretching. “I have to teach a restorative yoga class in half an hour, so I’ve got to get going anyway.”

  “I would like to take yoga,” Jaden said wistfully. “From what I’ve observed it has a very interesting effect on the human nervous system.”

  “Jaden, you may be the perfect man.”

  Jaden beamed at her. I raised a hand. “Hang on, I have done yoga. It just didn’t do anything for me.”

  Jaden was looking at me with the singular attention of a dog wanting to be fed and I realised that yoga would certainly be a powerful way of experiencing his new body. “All right, but I need a shower and shave first. And I’m not going to twist myself into downward bunny or whatever.”

  “It’s downward dog, Mitchell,” EZ said. She put an arm around Jaden as his face lit.

  My belly twisted, looking at him. So much innocence on that narrow, poet’s face.

  On impulse I pressed my mouth to his. When I would have pulled away, Jaden stopped me. “Mitchell…” he growled, looking at my lips. “You move me.”

  My Beloved Yoga was on the edge of the university, right before woods sprouted, surrounding the campus in Douglas firs and red cedars. EZ’s mother owned the studio, so EZ had grown up drinking wheat grass juice served in the adjacent organic cafe and doing headstands when her mother wasn’t packing her off to India on pilgrimage. I figured EZ’d end up taking over the business one day, but in the meantime she attended various women’s studies classes, which usually left her pissed off and hating all men. I was the exception since being gay didn’t make me as much of an oppressive pig in her eyes.

  I’d managed to dig up sweatpants for me and Jaden. It wasn’t cool and expensive yoga wear, but it would do. Before we’d left my house, Jaden had repaired the front door. EZ and I had watched goggle-eyed as he’d levitated it back into place and then fixed the damage with a casual wave.

  Now Jaden was practically vibrating with excitement as he paced the studio space, looking at posters of the chakra symbols and studying the display of Tibetan singing bowls and rose quartz candle votives.

  “Just take it easy today, Jaden,” EZ advised him as people began to arrive for her laidback class. “Remember to listen to your own body.”

  “My own body…” he repeated. “I have a body!”

  I rolled my eyes and sat down on one of the mats, noting that EZ didn’t spare much advice on me. But she knew I was hopelessly unathletic and usually spaced out into thinking about my work when I did asanas. I just couldn’t concentrate on my breathing when I might be on the verge of solving a problem.

  Jaden was attracting attention. At first I thought it was merely his incredible good looks, those brown eyes that could glow an uncanny gold and the flowing hair he’d tied back, but then I remembe
red he’d been featured in the news.

  He was supposed to be dead.

  Well, this was awkward.

  But we’d figure out a cover story; that the reporter had got the name wrong. It should work in the short term. And then it hit me. Okay, he’d told me he’d taken over Jaden’s body in a hurry when he’d realised something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t getting over my flu. Did he mean to stay Jaden after we’d dealt with Mr X? Or would he have to leave, to return to his people?

  Maybe he was extra eager to experience things like yoga and climaxes because it was a one-time deal.

  “Mitchell, you are not concentrating on your breathing,” Jaden scolded me.

  “How do you know?”

  “Your matrix.”

  “Right. Shoulda known.” I closed my eyes and tried to pay attention to my chest rising and falling instead of Jaden leaving my life as abruptly as he’d entered it.

  Yoga class turned out to be not so bad. Apparently, restorative involved a lot of lounging around in weird positions on cushions and yeah, more breathing. I did tune out sometimes to consider my current projects, but every time I did, Jaden knew and prodded me to refocus on the class.

  “You are as important as your work, are you not?” he demanded.

  I was more comfortable in the cafe, sipping espresso served by EZ’s mom. Sitting with EZ and Jaden felt like I was with my two best friends. If life could always be like this…it would be perfect. Better than the fake relationship I’d gone for at the Halloween party.

  And speaking of fake relationships, who should walk in right then but Riley and his girlfriend.

  Perfect.

  EZ caught my tension and looked over her shoulder. “Those French braids aren’t very attractive on Mallory,” she said, referring to Riley’s blonde girlfriend, Mallory Clark. “Her hair isn’t long enough.” EZ’s hair, in contrast, was long enough to look great in French braids.

  “It’s okay, EZ,” I told my friend. “I’ve seen him around a few times since Halloween. No big deal.”