Chapter 7: Second Date

Liz arrived right on time, Jamie opening the door to see her massive frame blocking it completely. She leaned down so that she could see him, waving a clawed hand in greeting. He invited her in, and she carefully lowered herself down onto his couch, her hips so wide that she could take up almost the entire thing by herself.

“Want anything to drink?” he asked, finishing off the last mouthful of his morning coffee.

“Nah, let’s get some breakfast somewhere,” she replied. “There are no pigs on Borealis, and I have a hankering for some bacon.” She opened her mouth to yawn, exposing a set of sharp teeth, her long tongue coiling in the air like the tentacle of an octopus. “Sorry,” she added, “still adjusting to Earth’s schedule. Jumplag is a bitch.”

“I know a place that does a great full English,” Jamie said, pulling on his jacket. “I stop there on my way to work sometimes. Come on, it’s only a few levels down.”

They rode an elevator down to the nearest plaza, a commercial area that took up a few floors of the building, walkways and platforms extending across the open shaft that made up its core. There was a steady flow of fresh air that rose up from the ground level, convection keeping it circulating through the structure, the breeze rustling the leaves on the decorative trees and ferns. With the sunlight that made it through the carefully-placed windows, one could almost pretend that they were outside, at least enough to save from going stir crazy.

The café had a nice view of the city, so they sat at a table near one of the windows, Liz taking up her usual position on the floor. They both ordered an English breakfast, with several human portions for the hungry Borealan, watching the sunrise as they ate.

“I meant to ask you about packs,” Jamie said, watching as Liz consumed what looked like a pound of bacon. “You had one on Borealis, right? What was that like?”

“There are good things and bad things about living in a pack,” she began, mulling over the question as she prodded at a fried egg with a fork that seemed far too small for her giant hands. “On one hand, you’re never alone, but on the other, you’re ‘never alone’. It can be nice to know that there’s a group of people who will never leave your side, who will back you up no matter what, but getting a moment of peace from them can be difficult. They’re like lost puppies, they don’t know what to do with themselves when left to their own devices.”

“I suppose that most Borealans wouldn’t ever want isolation,” Jamie suggested, Liz nodding her head.

“You’re probably right. The fact that I wanted to just be on my own sometimes must have confused them. They didn’t like that I wouldn’t sleep with them, either. Borealans all share a big bed and sleep in a pile, it’s a social thing, but that was one aspect of pack life that clashed way too strongly with my Earth upbringing.”

“How does it work?” Jamie continued, pausing to take a sip of his coffee. “Like, are there Borealans without a pack who you choose from?”

“It’s a little more ... violent than that,” she explained. “If I fight you, and you lose, that makes you subordinate to me. If you decide you don’t want to fight, and you choose to submit, same deal. If you’re subordinate to me, that means you have to do what I say. A pack is usually made up of an Alpha, and between four and eight Borealans who are submissive to them. The Alpha’s job is then to look out for the welfare of their pack, keep them safe, a little like a parent figure. After winning a few fights, I ended up with some tagalongs, and things kind of just escalated from there. It felt weird at first, but it made me safer, and they ended up being genuinely helpful. Imagine having five people hanging out with you who want to cook for you and do your laundry because you beat them up,” she laughed, reveling in the absurdity of it. “They weren’t really my friends, or my family, but those are the only human terms I can think of that come close.”

“And what they own becomes yours, right?”

“Yeah, the pack pools their resources. Suddenly, I had a house, because one of my packmates owned one. I had money that wasn’t mine, but that they trusted me to spend on their behalf. I was living very comfortably after a while, it ended up being pretty easy to get what I wanted.” She looked out of the window at the sky beyond, leaning her head in her hand, reflecting for a few moments. “It would have been just as easy to get carried away with it all. I could have kept climbing the ladder until I was as rich and as powerful as a Matriarch, but I was so fixated on my goal of getting back here.”

“Sounds like you became pretty tight,” Jamie continued, dipping a piece of toast in his egg yolk. “Was it hard to leave them behind?”

“A little,” she admitted. “I could have brought them back with me, and they would have been glad to follow, but it wouldn’t have been fair. I’ve been ripped from one society and transplanted into another, I know what it feels like to be lost, confused. They’ll be fine,” she added, shrugging her shoulders. “My second-in-command will take over, and it will be like I never left. This is where I want to be,” she said confidently. “If things don’t work out, I have something to go back to, but y’know...”

If their relationship didn’t work out, was what she meant, but it was still too soon to say so openly. Liz had built a life on Borealis, one that she had abandoned to come find him. It made him feel even worse about how he had initially greeted her upon her return.

“What about you?” she asked, popping another strip of bacon into her mouth as she peered at him across the table with an expectant look in her eyes. “Did you just sit on your hands while I was gone, or did you try to date any of those girls who were always chasing you around like pigs sniffing out a truffle?”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it,” he chuckled.

“I had no love for those girls,” she continued, spearing a Yorkshire pudding rather aggressively with her fork. “They were airheads, they only liked you because of your looks. Besides, you were ‘my’ Jamie.”

He laughed, then sobered a little as he considered what he wanted to tell her. It was no real crime to have kissed Rachel in Liz’s absence, it wasn’t like they were engaged, and Liz seemed to have expected him to pursue other relationships. Still, it kind of felt like a betrayal, as little sense as that made. It was probably better, to be honest.

“There was this one time,” he began, Liz’s ears pricking up. “It was maybe a year after you left. I got invited to this house party in the old suburb where you used to live, and one of my friends told me that Rachel wanted me to attend.”

“Rachel,” Liz mused, scratching her chin as she wracked her brain. “Oh, yeah, I think I remember her. Blonde hair, bit of a queen bee, well-endowed,” she chuckled.

Jamie was about to inform her that calling anyone else well-endowed was a form of irony but quickly thought better of it. Judging by the bulges in her bomber jacket, Liz was sporting breasts that were easily larger than Rachel’s entire head.

“Did I give you a thing for blondes, Jamie?” Liz teased. “It’s kind of cute...”

“As it turned out, getting me to attend was just part of her master plan,” he continued as he wiggled his fingers ominously for emphasis. “She likely put my friend up to inviting me, and she made sure that I ended up alone with her pretty quickly. I was drinking a bit, one thing led to another, and we ended up in one of the upstairs bedrooms.”

Now, Liz’s smile faltered a little. She might have been expecting him to have dated other people during her absence, but hearing it from his own lips probably stung more than she had anticipated.

“Don’t worry,” he added hastily, “we didn’t go any further than a kiss.”

“It’s not like I’m worried,” she grumbled, rapping her claws on the table in a way that suggested otherwise. “I was gone, I didn’t expect you to save yourself indefinitely.”

“Thing is, the moment our lips touched, it just felt ... wrong. I’d been kissed before, by someone who meant it,” he continued as his face began to redden. The implication wasn’t lost on Liz, her expression warming again. “I was drunk off my ass, and the only thing going through my head was that I had to get away. So I’m backing away from Rachel, who is now yelling at me for rejecting her, trying to find some way out of that room. I spy a window, so I throw it open and jump down from the second floor. Luckily, there was a bay window to break my fall, or I might have busted an ankle. She was still screaming obscenities at me as I ran off down the street with my pants falling around my ankles.”

Liz threw her head back, laughing at the mental image.

“I don’t suppose that won you many friends in her clique?” she asked, still chuckling to herself.

“I was basically persona non grata for the next two years of college,” he replied, unable to contain his own smile. “You’d think it would be humiliating, but it really wasn’t. Those people were never my friends, their opinions were meaningless to me. From that point, I just focused on graduating and on my job. I’ve not thought much about relationships since.”

“That’s a good story,” she said, finishing off her eggs. “You’ve made new friends since then, right?”

“Oh, sure,” he said with a nod. “There are some guys I met at work who I hang out with pretty often, they’re cool. We started chatting on shift, and it turned out that most of us played the same games, so we ended up playing together.”

“You should show me,” Liz said. “I’ve been out of the loop for a while, haven’t played any games in ages.”

“I’d take you to an arcade, but I doubt they’d have any headsets in your size.”

“So, what ‘are’ we doing today?” she asked as she set down her cutlery. “Got anything special planned?”

“I had a few things in mind,” he replied. “You done with your meal? Let’s get to it.”

“What’s ‘holo-painting’?” Liz asked, looking up at the sign above the twin doors. She was so tall that the animated graphic was nearly at eye-level to her. They had traveled across the city to another skyscraper by mag-lev, their destination situated on one of the building’s commercial plazas. It wasn’t unlike the one where they had eaten breakfast earlier that morning, convection carrying a pleasant breeze up through the building’s hollow core, the walkways around them clogged with shoppers going about their business.

“You’ll find out,” Jamie replied, leading her inside. “I was up late last night trying to think of cool date ideas, and this was one of the places I looked up.”

“There aren’t many people here,” she said, glancing around the mostly empty foyer.

“I thought it would be a good idea to come early. That way, you’d have more room to move around.”

They walked over to a counter, behind which was a woman in a dark-grey uniform that was patterned with a rainbow of fake paint splotches. She glanced up at them, doing a double-take when she saw Liz towering over her. She quickly turned her attention back to her computer terminal, beginning to swipe at the holographic display.

“I’d like a two-hour session for a party of two, please,” Jamie said. She waved her hands across her display with practiced speed, scarcely looking up from her work.

“That’ll be twenty-five credits each for a total of fifty,” she replied, ducking behind the counter. She reemerged with two cylindrical objects in her hands, setting them on the surface. It was a pair of remotes molded from dark plastic, each one sporting a handful of buttons, and a semi-transparent sphere the size of a golf ball on one end.

“Here are your controllers,” the employee explained. “This strap fastens around your wrist, please keep it on at all times to avoid damaging the device by dropping or throwing it. This button here toggles the brush size, this one changes the color, and this one is the eraser.”

Liz lifted one of the controllers, tying the strap around her wrist. It was small in her oversized hand, but still perfectly usable, even if she might have some difficulty hitting the buttons with her padded fingers.

“It’s just through there,” the employee said, gesturing to a door at the end of the foyer. “I’ll start your timer when you go through.”

Liz eyed Jamie quizzically, and he gave her a reassuring nod, affixing his own device. They made their way through the door and into a large, open room, the walls covered in some kind of black fabric. The floor and ceiling were similarly dark, and the only details that they could make out were a series of angled lights arranged on rigs all around them. It looked like the lighting for a concert, but miniature, a few of the devices swiveling to track them. It was so dark that once the door was closed, they were plunged into almost complete blackness.

Jamie switched on his controller, the semi-transparent ball on its tip lighting up with a dull, red glow. He waved it through the air like a wand, leaving a trail of what looked like crimson paint in the air. It was holographic, projected by the many devices that surrounded them, flickering a little as it hovered there.

Liz walked around the floating streak, her eyes wide as she examined it.

“It’s a hologram,” she mused, passing her hand through it. “This room must be a giant projector.”

“It’s like 3D painting,” Jamie explained, changing the color to green before drawing another line. Liz did the same, waving her controller through the air, drawing a floating spiral above his head.

“Okay, that’s pretty cool,” Liz chuckled. “Stand still a sec...”

She waved her wand near his face, then on top of his head, standing back to appraise her work. Jamie stepped aside, seeing that she had doodled whiskers and a pair of cat ears on him, which were now hovering where he had been standing.

“I think it’s an improvement,” she said, crossing her arms as she grinned at him.

After half an hour of messing around and drawing clown faces on each other, they decided to fill in one corner of the room with a jungle, doing their best to replicate trees and plants. Liz was taller, so she handled the hanging vines, the branches, and the leaves. Jamie crouched low to the floor, covering it in a carpet of ferns, changing the hue of his virtual brush to create colorful flowers. No matter how crude their artwork, the three-dimensional aspect gave the amateurish representations of plants a certain realism that they would have lacked on paper, the two of them ducking and leaning around the flickering lines as they added more to their canvas.

“You should add in some parrots on those branches,” Jamie suggested as he added the finishing touches to a blue rose. “You still remember what they look like?”

“I wasn’t gone ‘that’ long,” she chuckled, giving him a playful whip with her long tail. “I’ll do a ... macaw. She’ll be blue, with a yellow belly.”

“I want to do something with some color,” Jamie said, stepping back to admire their work. “Maybe some tree frogs.”

“Poison dart frog,” Liz said.

“Yeah, those ones with the black spots.”

“I was skeptical at first, but this is pretty fun,” Liz chuckled. “Shame we can’t keep it, it’ll all get erased when our time is up.”

“Maybe we can take a picture when we’re finished,” Jamie replied, Liz nodding her head. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and unfolded it, checking the display. “We’ve got about ten minutes left.”

“I’m just putting the finishing touches on my parrot,” she said, filling in the black beak. Satisfied, she drew back, twirling her wand around on its strap. “Not too shabby, considering I haven’t seen a zoology textbook in three years.”

“Okay, stand in the middle of it,” Jamie said as he held up his phone. He put it in the vertical position, as their pastel jungle was a little taller than it was wide. Liz placed her hands on her hips proudly, grinning at the camera. “Got it.”

“This is something about Earth that I really missed,” she sighed, turning to glance at their creation again.

“What, painting?” Jamie asked as he cocked an eyebrow at her.

“No, not that. I meant not being constantly preoccupied with keeping up appearances. On Borealis, everything that you do is scrutinized, and anything that could be perceived as a show of weakness or vulnerability is exploited. You’re on guard all the time, and your social status is tied directly to your quality of life, to your level of autonomy. I don’t have to posture, I don’t have to play the tough guy, I can just paint tree frogs with my goofy boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” she replied, giving him a grin. “We’re on a date, aren’t we?”

“I suppose we are, yeah,” he replied as he returned her infectious smile.

“Time’s nearly up,” she added, glancing at their painting again. She turned back to him, a mischievous glint in her green eyes. “Wanna trash it?”

“Yeah,” Jamie replied, brandishing his wand gleefully. They proceeded to scrawl all over the jungle scene, erasing parts of it, vandalizing others. Before long, they had covered it all in multi-color paint, leaving a mess that looked remarkably like a work of abstract art.

“That was fun,” Liz chuckled, unzipping her jacket to cool off a little. There was a sudden loud, clunking sound, the lights in the room turning on as the holographic painting vanished in a shimmer. The door to the room swung open, Jamie nodding in its direction.

“Looks like our time’s up.”

“I want to go to a park,” Liz said as they stepped out onto the street at ground level.

“We can do that,” Jamie replied, pulling up his phone. “There’s one not far from us, and we can pick up some food on the way there, make a picnic out of it.”

“Now you’re talking my language,” she said, giving him a nudge with her elbow.

“Gotta keep that Borealan engine fired up,” he chuckled. “I think this calls for street food, you usually can’t go ten paces without seeing a stall. Come on, the park is this way,” he added as he gestured down the street.

Being in the company of a Borealan had its benefits. The crowds that clogged the sidewalk were quick to scurry out of her path, erroneously fearing that she would crush them beneath her feet. It made strolling through the city a whole lot less claustrophobic.

It wasn’t long before they encountered a food stall, or rather, before Liz’s nose caught its scent. She was like a bloodhound, turning her head to track the enticing smell, leading Jamie over to a wheeled cart that was set up on the side of the street. As they approached, he began to smell it too, the scents joined by the electrical whir of a battery bank. It was powering an animated sign with a depiction of what looked like meat on a rotisserie, along with a Greek flag. There was a vending machine built into the side of the cart, another sign promising cold beverages.

Inside was a portly man standing beside a hunk of meat that was slowly turning on a vertical spit, the red glow of a heating element roasting it as it rotated, giving it a golden-brown color.

“Gyros!” Liz exclaimed, practically bouncing on the spot as she leaned in to examine the flickering menu that was being projected beside the window. The owner seemed alarmed by the sudden appearance of the towering alien, but her excitement was endearing, and he leaned out to greet them.

“What can I get you?” he asked, his completely mundane accent contrasting with the Greek stylings of his cart.

“I’ll take five chicken gyros with all the trimmings, and two helpings of fries,” Liz replied. “Don’t hold the cheese, I want as much as you’re legally allowed to give me.”

“Alright,” the man chuckled as he vanished into the shadow of his stall. “Big eater, this one. And you, sir?”

“I guess I’ll have what she’s having,” Jamie replied. “One portion, though.”

“Coming right up,” the man replied, lifting a piece of thick pita bread that more resembled a pancake. He began to scrape off meat from the surface of the rotating mass with a sharp knife, stacking it tall on the bread. When the first one was suitably full, he moved over to another worktop, adding slices of onion, and a handful of iceberg lettuce. After that, he added what looked like a generous helping of feta cheese, sprinkling it on top of the mess.

“You want the Tzatziki sauce with that?” he asked, Jamie looking to Liz for guidance.

“Yeah, plenty of sauce,” she replied. “Don’t worry,” she added, glancing back at Jamie with a wide smile on her face. “It’s really good.”

“Trust the alien to know more about Earth cuisine than I do,” he grumbled, watching the man work his magic. He was so fast, every step of the process practiced to perfection, his knife flashing through the air. He must have done this a hundred times a day for years, he was like a surgeon with that thing. In no time at all, the six gyros were ready. They were stacked neatly on the worktop, each one wrapped in silver foil to keep it warm and to prevent it from collapsing on itself. Next came the fries, the vendor dunking them into a vat of bubbling oil, the smells making Jamie’s stomach growl.