Outcast by Cheryl Brooks

was feeding them a dead rat.
    Bonnie had known there were rats and mice living in the shed, the other side of which housed the grain she kept from the last harvest to feed to the chickens and enocks, but she'd never managed to eradicate them. Apparently Lynx had had better luck.
    As Bonnie approached, Lynx looked up warily, as though expecting a reprimand, or at the very least, a heated argument.
    "Sure they won't bite you?" she remarked casually.
    "No," he replied, "they have not tried to harm me."
    Lulling him into a false sense of security, Bonnie decided. Then they would strike. "Well, just be careful," she cautioned him, not wanting to imagine what horrible gashes she might have to seal up if one of them were to tear into Lynx the way they were tearing into the rats he'd dropped over the fence. "Where'd you get the rats?"
    "They have been eating the grain," he replied. "I am catching them."
    "Enocks like them, huh?"
    "The birds are carnivores," he said bluntly. "They like meat better than grain."
    "Omnivores, actually," she corrected him. "They were researched pretty well before anyone settled here."
    "Their beaks are made for tearing meat," Lynx insisted, obviously not believing that the biologists who'd studied them knew what they were talking about.
    "But they do like fruit," Bonnie pointed out. "When Sylor and I were trying to catch them, seemed like they were always under a rabasha tree eating the fruit."
    "They will eat fruit if there is nothing else," Lynx said, his tone still curt, "but they prefer meat."
    Bonnie wondered if Lynx felt the same way. The food she'd given him had been primarily plant-based; perhaps he was trying to tell her something. The enocks certainly seemed happy, and Bonnie had about decided to trade her eggs for beef next time, rather than the usual butter and cheese, when she noticed an odd sound. At first she thought it was coming from the birds. Listening more closely, she realized that it wasn't the birds, but Lynx, and he was purring. Apparently, Drummond hadn't been kidding about that.
    "Well, feed them all the rats you like," she said, trying not to display her fascination with the way he purred. It was a very soothing sound, and obviously the enocks liked it, too. "How are you catching them?"
    "They are easily trapped," he replied, and said no more.
    Obviously he wasn't going to let her in on his secret. Bonnie had tried to trap them herself, but for a species that hadn't been around humans for eons like the rats of Earth, they were still pretty cagey.
    They were supposedly an indigenous variety, but they looked pretty much like any other rat Bonnie had ever seen, and they acted like them too. Maybe Lynx was catching them in self-defense — yet another reason she'd have preferred that he not live in the shed — and ought to have been enough to make him want to sleep somewhere else as well. In case he was regretting his original decision, Bonnie suggested carelessly, "Well, if you decide you can't sleep with them running around in there, you can always sleep in the house."
    "No," he said. Which was just what she expected him to say. She thought that perhaps he was like Drummond and needed the space. There was certainly plenty of that in the shed; the harvester droid was huge, dwarfing the rest of her equipment, and it took a large building to house it.
    "Suit yourself," she said with a shrug. "I wouldn't want to sleep out there, but that's up to you."
    Shaking her head, Bonnie turned and went back to the house to finish making his pants. The length was a guess, because if the way he avoided any kind of contact with her — physical or otherwise — was any indication, she knew he would never let her measure his inseam! In fact, since that first day when he had carried her into the house and bound up her arm, they hadn't even been close enough to shake hands.
    While she worked, the purring sound he'd made stole into Bonnie's thoughts. What would it feel like to kiss him while he was