Alien's Bride Book One by Yamila Abraham

fish and I followed suit.
    “Oh, uh, geez.   Where do I start?”   The fish broke apart into tender flakes.   “I was in the Peace Corps for two years.   I’d only been out for a few weeks when you…got me.”
    “Go earlier than that.   Start with your childhood.”
    I chewed for a few seconds while trying to come up with a way to change the topic.   Commenting on the pretty floor tiles would have made my discomfort too obvious.   Unless a spider ran across the table I was probably stuck.
    “Okay.”   I took a deep breath.   “My mom met my dad when she was on a cruise in Puerto Rico.   Oh, um, a cruise is when people go on big ships to visit islands and stuff.   Anyway, she ended up staying in Puerto Rico and marrying him.   They did a lot of drugs.   When my grandmother, my mother’s mother, came to visit she ended up taking me back home with her to her farm in Nebraska.   I was a baby.   It was just me and her on this big forty acre farm.   I helped with the chickens and the goats and picked raspberries and even drove around on the tractor.   The house was falling apart and she hardly ever had money to buy me school clothes—but, God, I loved it there.”
    Elentinus smiled.
    “I met my mom for the first time when I was nine.   We had only talked on the phone a few times before then.   She came down because my grandmother was dying of liver cancer caused by her Hepatitis B.   My mom looked older than my grandmother.   She was just a total wasted out junkie.   She got clean for a year and a half after she moved in with us, though.   After my grandmother died she relapsed hard and started bringing drug-dealing creeps over to the house.   One of them walked in on me while I was changing and I ran away from home.   I was put in a group home for girls.   I was…13 maybe?   The staff were assholes there, but I got along fine with the other girls, and it was better than living with my mother.”   I searched the ceiling to remember what happened next.   “I was 16 when my mom froze to death by passing out outside in the dead of winter.   The police made me sign paperwork to put her in a pauper’s grave.”
    Elentinus made a sympathetic noise.
    “I always thought that I could go back to my grandmother’s house after I graduated high school.   I was going to fix the place up and get the land working again.   Someone from the bank came to the group home with a box of some of my stuff from the house.   He let me know that my mom had used the property for collateral on a loan and they were confiscating it.   So, poof.   There went my dream of moving back home.”
    “What a pity,” Elentinus said.
    His voice knocked me out of the trance I’d gone into while I bared my soul.   I swished my food around my plate.  
    “So…um…”
    “Could you have stayed at the group home indefinitely?”
    I perked up.   “No.   They kick you out when you turn 18.   That was a major stressor for me, you know?   I didn’t have any family or any place to go.   I ended up enrolling in college just so I could live in the dorms.   Since I was a ward of the state my education would be fully paid for.   I figured it was the best solution for me.”
    “What did you study?”
    “Agricultural Science.   That’s farming, pretty much.   I still dreamed of living on a little farm the way I had when I was a kid.”
    “How charming.”
    I felt myself blushing again.   “It was probably not the best choice for me.   The economy tanked my sophomore year.   The odds of me getting a job right out of school were slim.   The government wasn’t going to pay for me to go for my masters, so I couldn’t stall.   I thought about joining the army but we had so many nasty conflicts going on in the Middle East.”
    “Ah.”   Elentinus leaned back with interest.   “So women could serve in the military even in your era?”
    I nodded with a touch of pride.
    “I thought this ‘Peace’ Corps you