QSFer Nessa Claugh has a new FF sci-fi romance out: Tasting the Alien.
Where do humans fit on the human-alien cuisine menu?
Aliens had weird food. At least that’s what Joan told herself when she went to find the four-armed alien pilot who’d helped get the stranded humans settled onto the Relief. Finding her was one thing. By the end of their meeting, she found herself with a job cooking for the humans on board, an alien sous-chef with no kitchen skills, and a crush that wouldn’t go away.
This is a short story set in the RAGRIM CONFLICT series. It can be read alone but is best read after ENSNARED BY THE ALIEN MEDIC. It is a short F/F slice-of-life story set in space.
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Excerpt
“I can’t thank you enough,” Bosth muttered quietly as they got further down the hall.
“Don’t mention it,” Joan said. “Three on one is like the furthest thing from fair.”
“Stars, they were persistent,” Bosth said. “Are they still looking?”
Joan glanced back. The little group had begun to move down the opposite way, and she could only hope they were in fact heading for their classroom and not out to hunt for another alien to sexually harass.
“Just keep moving,” Joan sighed. “They’ll give up eventually, I’ve been there before.”
Bosth glanced down at Joan and she could feel her cheeks burn under the alien’s stare. “Which side?”
“Theirs, if you must know,” Joan said. “Secondary school was a lonely place and I sort of fixated on the one teacher that was like me.”
“Like you?” Bosth said.
“Into women,” Joan said.
Bosth raised an eyebrow. “So the girls weren’t just trying to get a rise out of me?”
Joan looked her over. “They were likely quite interested,” she said. “I thought you weren’t into girls like that?”
“I’m not!” Bosth said hotly. “I just didn’t want to be outright mean about it. They’ve been through a lot. You all have.”
Joan felt a sudden rush of affection for this woman. “They’re lost in a place they’re unfamiliar with, thought they were going to be married off to strange aliens, and they are just trying to work through it as best as they can,” she said. “I’m eating my way through my trauma and they’re doing what they want to do, but that still doesn’t mean it’s OK for them to gang up on you. There’s no way all the aliens on the ship can possibly be as nice as you.”
“We’ve had issues before with personnel who were more interested in seeing what the humans had to offer than being responsible around them,” Bosth admitted. “Now I’m more concerned for their safety than I am their potential embarrassment, especially if they might be out looking for trouble. All the humans should have been fitted with therapy robots, though. I’ll talk to someone in ship security about location tagging the nonhuman personnel comms to make sure they don’t necessarily end up in the human areas or in long proximity with the bots unless they are cleared to be there.”
“That sounds a lot like a surveillance state with extra steps,” Joan said cautiously.
“You are currently living on a ship in space,” Bosth said. “A little extra security is warranted considering that the only thing between us and space is a few thin layers of metal with saline sandwiched between them.”
Joan couldn’t really argue. As long as their sessions with the therapy bots weren’t being tracked and she had a bare modicum of freedom, she’d be happier here than she would have been on Lukrim. At least she wasn’t forcibly married to a handful of blue aliens she’d never met before.
They turned a corner away from where the girls were, but Joan didn’t remove her arm. She couldn’t ignore that Bosth didn’t, either.
“I did have a reason for looking for you,” she admitted. “That wasn’t just a pity save.”
“Tell me how I can earn my rescue, my hero,” Bosth smirked. Her eyes were unexpectedly bright, and Joan tried not to shiver at the weight of her arm around Joan’s shoulders.
Author Bio
Nessa grew up thriving on trips to natural history museums and Jurassic Park. Once adulthood was upon her, it was only a matter of time before she discovered shifter romance and dominant aliens. She enjoys titillating the Triassic and stargazing.