Excerpt: Christophina's Garden

"I must say," Ethan remarks, "I've never seen someone so utterly transported to bliss by egg yolk before."

I contemplate sticking my tongue out at him, but it still has egg yolk on it and I'm still savoring it. Actual, proper, over easy, egg yolk, with just a bit of salt. I use my spoon to open up the second egg, tap a bit of salt onto the exposed yolk and scoop up the yolk with the spoon. Yeah, bliss indeed.

The rest of the spread is rather nice, too. Toast, jam, hash browns of the rather exotic Big Chunks Of Potato variety and juice in a crystal glass. Ethan ordered his scrambled. Dork.

Ethan smiles and musses my hair slightly as he goes to the other side of the table to sit down. The suite is spacious enough to include a table, where we've set up our late-night room service breakfast. We end up eating in an amiable quiet, since we're both pretty hungry and we're still a bit brain-numbed and exhausted from the flight.

I finish my food and wander to the bathroom for a shower. I close the door behind me and start getting undressed.

There's a knock on the door. "Hey!" Ethan says, "Are you taking your clothes off in there?"

"Yeah," I reply.

"And why am I not invited?"

"I'm just taking a shower, Ethan,"

"And I ask again, why am I not invited?"

I swing the door open. "Do you really want to be?"

He looks me up and down and grins. "Yes. Yes, I do. Besides, if I wait for you to finish your shower, I'm likely to fall dead asleep, so it might be better if you keep me awake so we can both go to bed clean."

"What, you didn't want to stay up all night and celebrate your return to Earth? And you call yourself a rock star."

"I don't call myself a rock star; I just pretended to be one on television. Did you actually want to stay up all night after surviving that flight?"

"No, not really. Come on in, you doofus, shower's big enough for two, I guess."