When he returned, Cherry was putting the dinner on the table. Mike sat down as she sat next to him in a typical little domestic scene. He was struck b... how ordinary this was. He took some of the stew and took a bite. It was delicious. "This is good," he said enthusiastically."What, are you surprised?" Cherry asked."Um, no. That's not what I meant," he temporized.Cherry smiled letting him off the hook. "I'm glad you like it."After dinner, Mike and Cherry sat in the living room. Both looked. . good."She smiled warmly. "I've enjoyed it," she said.I opened my mouth again, about to invite her to call me 'Will', but somehow I couldn't get the words out, eventually saying, "Drive carefully; it's icy." I will," she said, without a hint of bridling at what some might have taken as an imputation they couldn't recognise the danger. "And you look after yourself, Mister Burgin."The lift in my mood was sufficient to motivate me to make sandwiches for tea and brew some herbal concoction that's. Good. Maybe he was just getting used to the aliens now, but there was something about her scent that tickled the back of his brain, it was confusing. They were aliens after all, completely distinct from humans, and yet similar in so many ways. Two of which were very obvious to him at that moment.What if he just ... touched them? She was asleep, and even then, the aliens had no concept of personal space. He doubted that she would have cared. He delved his hand into one of her boobs gingerly,. Around six that evening after most people had left the bar, Barbara Lee and Rick had made him a plate of food and sent him home. They insisted that they would clean the bar.The plate of food sat open and untouched, on the coffee table surrounded by the seven beers he had chugged down and the bottle of whiskey he was now nursing.The knock on the door startled him out of his musing on how things had gone horribly wrong with his dad. He supposed things had never been right after his mom had passed.