The man at the bar had been looking at her all night. Not at her tits, although lord knew Shauna was used to that. Puberty had cursed her to a lifetime of back problems, poor posture, and an entire gender (including two of her last six boyfriends) who could spend an hour talking to her and not know what color her eyes were. But the stranger sitting with his back to the bar, the pale guy with the lank, wispy blond hair who dressed like a Forties gangster complete with fedora and who'd been nursing a gin and tonic for the past two hours while he watched her out on the dance floor with her friends? He kept staring directly at her waist.
Not her ass, not her legs, not her swaying hips. Her waist. She could practically draw a dotted line between his watery blue eyes and a spot about an inch below her belly button. His gaze occasionally flicked to other women at first, but somewhere over the course of the evening he'd rejected all other applicants for the role of 'object of my creepy fucking attention' and zeroed in on Shauna. And once he did, she couldn't get rid of him. She put something like five people in between them, she sat on the other side of Melanie and Michelle, she ducked into the restroom and took her sweet time washing her hands afterwards... and when she emerged, there he was looking at her again like he saw her right through the walls.
Shauna tried to ignore him. She tried to hide from him. She even thought about calling it a night early, but she hadn't gone out in almost a month and she wasn't about to let some weird creepy entitled guy spoil her first evening with her friends in ages. So finally, around about ten o'clock, she walked right up to him, drew herself up to her full 5'7" height (5'5" without the platform heels, but who was counting?) smacked the bar behind him hard enough to redden her hand, and said, "What the FUCK, dude? Are you some kind of fucking alien? What the fuck is your deal?"
His gaze flicked up to meet Shauna's hazel eyes. He looked at her for a second, staring at her without blinking, his face utterly devoid of expression. It reminded Shauna of those old Star Trek episodes where Kirk did something unpredictable and the robot glitched out trying to incorporate it into its ultra-logical worldview. Not surprise, not alarm, just a total flat-footed inability to understand the right response. Shauna felt suddenly, queasily guilty that she might have just been a total jerk to someone with a legitimate social anxiety disorder or something.
Then he licked his lips, quickly and nervously like a lizard. "Why yes, I am an alien," he replied. "That's very interesting. Most people don't notice. Did I miss some sort of cue in the mating ritual that tipped you off? I've seen some males of your species change colors to signal their awareness of a female's attention. Should I be turning red right now?"
Shauna rolled her eyes. He really thought this was cute, didn't he? He was so damn sure that she was going to be swept off his feet by his quirky, nerdy sense of humor and completely forget the three solid hours he spent giving her the creeper stare. Shouldn't he be doing this bit at a science fiction convention, at least, or maybe even a Renaissance Festival where they'd only get annoyed at him for being the wrong kind of weird? "Sure, right, you're an alien," she snarked, making no effort to hide her irritation. "And let me guess, you're here to mate with human women?" Good fucking Christ, he'd somehow managed the feat of finding a pickup line she'd never heard before and making it sound trite and predictable. It was almost perversely impressive.
The stranger tilted his head slightly, like a golden retriever trying to figure out where the ball was. Once again, Shauna was momentarily struck by the genuine strangeness of his reactions to the unexpected--his eyes didn't widen, his breathing didn't change, but she could tell nonetheless that he was responding emotionally. Just not in any way she recognized. "As it happens, yes," he replied, his tone still not rising or falling at any point. He reminded her of those elaborate celebrity voice synthesizers that could repeat a whole sentence, the ones that nobody used because they didn't know how to put emphasis on anything. "I think you're the best candidate, too. I've been examining your reproductive system, and you're clearly in heat at the moment."
Shauna blinked hard. "I'm, um, excuse me? I'm what? You what?" She was almost too bewildered to be angry; she'd been given a number of inappropriate compliments in her time, from men praising the ratio between her chest and her waist to guys telling her that her short black hair didn't make her look too butch to fuck to dudes who told her she'd be absolutely perfect if she just got lip injections, but this... this took the cake. This took the whole damn bakery. This made off with an entire business line of mass-produced pastry products, and Shauna didn't even know how to begin telling this asshole where to go fuck himself over it.
"In heat," the stranger repeated with patronizing slowness... and yet, strangely enough, still not emphasizing the syllables in any way, shape or form. "You're ovulating. I did a full medical scan, I assure you. Your ovaries have released an egg through your Fallopian tubes into your uterus, and you are primed for reproduction. Only three other women in this room tonight can say that." He smiled, but it didn't look like an authentic, genuine smile. It looked like someone who had heard the act of smiling described to them and was attempting to replicate it from that alone.
It didn't exactly unnerve Shauna, but suddenly she began to have a tiny sliver of doubt in her mind about the stranger's apparent joke. Nobody committed to a bit this hard, not without a camera crew in hiding and a release form at the ready. Even Borat broke character eventually, right? "You can... see my uterus," she said, reminding herself to stay skeptical. Just because the guy believed it didn't mean it was true. "Like, just, with your eyes? You're just looking through my flesh right at my uterus?"
The man raised his head up, slowly lowered it, and returned it to a neutral position. Shauna realized he was attempting to nod. "Oh, yes," he said, pausing momentarily as if uncertain whether to try another nod or whether the one was sufficient to indicate understanding. "We have a number of talents and abilities entirely lacking in the human species--that's why I want to mate with you, actually. Your species is being considered for admittance to a mutually beneficial coalition of sentients from across the galaxy, and the exchange isn't merely cultural. We hybridize our biological traits in order to produce a wider and more optimal selection of genetic diversity."