Alien Nation #3 - Body and Soul Read Free Page B

slowly, “Maybe a few hours wouldn’t kill me.”
    “It will go a long way towards not killing anyone else,” George had said reasonably.
    Sikes fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.
    He had not bothered to set his alarm clock because he hadn’t really believed that he’d fall asleep . . . overestimating, as always, his own durability. So it was fortunate that he awoke when he did, because when he saw what time it was he realized, with a start, that he had a date with Cathy that night that he had already put off twice. If he put it off a third time, she might put him off permanently.
    Cathy Frankel was the attractive Newcomer doctor who lived across the hallway from him. She had been occupying his thoughts a great deal lately, and for someone as resolutely single-minded as Sikes, this was something of an accomplishment.
    Now he stared into the mirror, rubbing his hand across his beard stubble. He had trouble believing that he was giving this much thought and second-guessing to what Cathy might think of his appearance.
    To shave or not to shave, that was the question.
    “Think this out,” he said to no one in particular. “Newcomer males are hairless . . . so it might be that if I’m clean shaved, I’ll remind her more of what turns her on. Yeah. That’s it.”
    He started to lather up, but then paused. “But . . .” he continued, “perhaps the thing she likes about me is that I’m hairier. That could be it,” he told the mirror. “She likes the hair. It’s unusual. It’s a turn-on. That’s what she goes for.”
    He washed off the lather . . . and then paused again.
    “But if that’s it . . . and she knows that I figured out that that’s it . . . then coming in with all this beard will seem like I’m coming on to her too much . . . which might be a turnoff.”
    He regarded himself a while longer.
    “You’re an idiot,” he told the mirror image. His reflection nodded in agreement.
    He lathered up and shaved, and as he did so he muttered to himself. “No point to this anyway,” he said. “If something was gonna happen between us, then it would have happened by now. You can’t force these things. Either they happen or they don’t. Gotta face it . . . Cathy isn’t turned on by me, hairless or hairy. And frankly, well . . . she doesn’t really do it for me, either. I mean . . . those spots and everything. And the way she looks at me sometimes, like I’m . . . I’m so odd-looking to her.”
    He took a long, hard look at himself in the mirror.
    Usually he liked to think of himself as “ruggedly handsome.”
    But now he really studied himself. His brown hair, slicked down from the shower, hung raggedly around his ears. And he could see that it was just starting to thin on top. His chin was particularly strong, he decided, and his lips were just way too thick. His face looked like . . . like an assemblage of random parts, rather than something that formed one cohesive whole.
    Mentally he called to mind Cathy’s image. Everything about her was aquiline and graceful. Her face, her head, her movements that were as fluid as a dancer’s, and she wasn’t even trying.
    His going after her was like a mutt sniffing around a golden retriever.
    “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. The physical thing . . . it’s not going to happen. Ever. That’s fine. So there’s no reason that we can’t just be friends. None. I mean . . . how often have I heard the ‘let’s be friends’ speech. So . . . it’ll be nice. Get the female perspective of things without the tension of the sex stuff. That’s it. That’s good. It’s a good thing.” He continued to shave and said once more, “It’s a good thing.”
    He finished shaving and dressed. As he did so, he told himself how nice it was going to be having a female who was just a friend and nothing more. Indeed, it would probably be a good experience for him. Give him the hang of thinking of females as something beyond sex objects. Not that he’d ever