The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition by Kaitlyn O'Connor Page B

it was either one
of them or a random wrong number.
    Glancing out the window, Chelsey
stared at the light for several moments before it sank in that it
was way too bright outside to be early morning. “Damn it!” She made
a grab for the phone to call the school just as it rang
again.
    “ Hello?”
    Why wasn’t she at school?
    She searched her mind for a lie that
might be believable. “Car trouble.”
    Why hadn’t she called to let them
know?
    “ Uh … actually that’s
because I didn’t break down until after I’d left the house—flat
tire!” she elaborated on inspiration. “And I was so filthy after
I’d changed it I had to come back to the apartment to clean up. I
was just on my way out. Could you get someone to watch my class
till I get there?”
    It occurred to her as soon as she hung
up that she should’ve given herself more time while she was
fabricating excuses! “Shit!”
    Dashing through the apartment, she
turned the shower on and grabbed her toothbrush while she was
waiting on the water. Fortunately, she didn’t have to undress.
Garryk had undressed her.
    The thought distracted her from her
purpose and she did a brief mental ‘radar’ survey of the apartment.
She didn’t hear him moving around and she hadn’t seen him when
she’d been running around the house. He must have left.
    Dismay flickered through
her, but she didn’t have time to examine it. Shoving her hair into
a shower cap, she leapt into the shower, scrubbed frantically, and
leapt out again. She’d already pulled her dress over her head
before she realized she hadn’t grabbed a bra. That would go over like a lead
balloon, she thought, racing to her dresser to search for one!
She’d be accused of trying to seduce the high school boys before
she could turn around!
    Garryk’s image rose in her
mind.
    She resolutely dismissed it. She
hadn’t seduced him! She hadn’t even tried!
    She’d wanted to, but
wanting didn’t count, damn it! If it did, ninety percent of the
world’s population would probably be in jail for wanting
something sometime that they shouldn’t have—maybe even ninety nine
percent!
    Maybe she didn’t deserve
brownie points for behaving herself, regardless of temptation, but
she wasn’t going to beat herself up over something she hadn’t done!
    She arrived at the school almost
halfway through her second class, completely unprepared since she’d
dashed out and left the papers she’d been grading the night before,
and it went downhill from there. Generally, she spent her lunch
period dividing her time between watching the students and trying
to make friendly with the other teachers. She was so distracted,
however, she didn’t pay attention to the students let alone the
other teachers.
    “ You ok, honey?” Emily
Watson asked her sympathetically as they were leaving the lunch
room.
    Chelsey stared at her blankly. “Uh …
yeah! Fine!”
    It had been an opening and the
possibility of making a friend, she realized later, but she hadn’t
felt up to inventing another lie and she sure as hell couldn’t tell
the truth!
    It finally jelled in her mind about
halfway through the afternoon why it was a lie that she was ‘fine’.
Garryk had vanished during the night without a word! She picked
over that and the implications with morbid intensity for a while
before a vague memory surfaced. She’d wondered how she got from the
couch to the bed when the last thing she remembered was conking out
on the couch under Garryk’s dead weight!
    They’d fallen off the couch and then
he’d picked her up and carried her to bed.
    He hadn’t joined her, though. He’d
said he had to go.
    Did that constitute ‘wham bam, thank
you, ma’am’, she wondered? Or was it sort of a good bye? As in,
I’ll see you later?
    She focused on it, trying to remember
something that would make her feel more hopeful that he was
planning a return engagement until she had a blinding headache.
She’d almost managed to convince herself that he