An anxious three-week wait

After placing your order with Studs 'R' Us, your life resumes as normal (or as normal as it can be, knowing what's on the way). In a couple of days, the email you were told to expect arrives, and you scroll to the bottom of each and every form to give it your approval without reading a single line. They range from a half-dozen to a hundred pages per-agreement, so part of you wonders if they ever really expected you to read through them at all. You know that they know that you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. As far as you're concerned, you're ready to pack up your boring nine-to-five drudge of a life to become the sexual partner and plaything of some well-endowed hyper-intelligent extraterrestrial lizard (or simulacrum of an extraterrestrial lizard; whatever).

As the days tick over into the second week, and your mind wanders more and more in speculation of how and when your 'first contact' will play out, you keep returning to those last words over the phone: 'full of surprises'. In other words, you should expect the unexpected? Somehow you doubt that they're just going to ring the doorbell one morning with a big box to deliver, and a hovercraft parked in the driveway. Once that fact dawns on you, things begin to get a little weird. Even though you know it's too early to reasonably expect your serpentine visitor, the mind begins playing tricks on you. Every time you find your keys in an unexpected place, or hear the ominous creaking of your house settling in the night, you find yourself suspecting a visitation.

Instead of easing off as you get time to adjust to your life decision, it only gets worse. By the beginning of the third week, you're scrutinising any odd behaviours or clothing exhibited by strangers on the street, wandering if your Reptilian Romeo is already out-and-about and observing you. How would you know? How could you begin to know? You're no alien super-intelligence yourself, so it could be anyone, anywhere. You're not sleeping well any more. Sometimes, when you're walking around your house at night, you think you can see a tall, slender silhouette down a darkened hallway, or you imagine that you can almost hear a 'hiss' from an adjacent room, but when you check, there's never anything there. One night, you wake up with a jolt from your half-dreaming state and almost fall right out of bed, because you couldn't tell if the eerie light momentarily cast upon your bedroom wall through your curtains is from a passing car, or something altogether different. There's no car when you look out of the window, but then again, they don't exactly stick around.

On the morning of the day three weeks from that fateful phone conversation, you stepped outside to find the clouds looked more... Regular than usual. One in particular was shaped like a torus - albeit an untidy one, and only if you looked at it with your head tilted - with what looked like ripples of clouds going outward from it. Before you knew it, you'd been standing in your driveway for about five minutes staring up at the sky, trying to work out if it was the atmospheric effect of a hidden ship closing in, or even some kind of cryptic message or signal. It was a Saturday, so you didn't have to worry about going into work, luckily. You only stopped what you were doing and retreated inside when you realised several of your neighbours had started staring at you inscrutably, some of them glancing up at the skies as well, presumably trying to tell what the hell you thought you were looking at. Not that you have the luxury of 'presuming' anything any more. Any one of them could have been your reptilian admirer, checking to see if you had noticed his clue.

That evening, the power went out. After recovering from your panic-attack and picking yourself up off the bathroom floor, you eventually gathered the nerve to venture outside and, after assuring yourself that your Reptilian was nowhere to be found and that the whole street was experiencing the same blackout, you lit some candles and (eventually) went to bed. You still peeked out from under the covers every now and then to check that there was nothing sharing the room with you, although since the candles had long-since died, there was no chance of seeing anything anyway.

Which is why it was all the more disturbing when your hide-and-peek routine lead you to discover that a pair of luminescent green, slitted eyes were hovering stationary in the darkness of your bedroom doorway, six-or-so feet above the ground, and gazing directly at you.