The silence between us was nothing like the previous day’s.Yesterday it had been potential energy, charged and building.This silence was denser.The silence of choices made.The silence of intimacy and difficult truths.Of destiny and things that could not be undone.
I felt him behind me the way I would gravitate toward a heater in a cold engine room.Without looking.Without needing to.My body already tuned to his presence with an accuracy that made the scanner in my hand feel redundant.I felt the ground.The grasses blowing.The waking awareness of the stormglass trees as energy moved through them from roots to canopy, the leaves themselves trembling with excitement.Energy.Life.
He moved through the silence between us without effort.No apparent uncertainty.No morning awkwardness.The same contained, certain ease he brought to everything.As if he already knew all the answers and was just waiting for me to catch up again.
But he didn’t know what I knew.How relentless and greedy my people could be.How easy it would be for them to destroy everything magical about this place.
His outward serenity was both deeply steadying and personally infuriating.I knew I wasn’t being logical.
I wanted him undone.I wanted to be the thing that undid him.
I had maybe three days left on this planet to want anything at all.
"You're quiet," he said.
"I'm thinking."
"What are you thinking about?"
“Nothing.My mind is just wandering.”What a fucking lie.I was thinking about his hands.About the way he said my name when he lost control, when he came inside me.About the fact that I was already grieving him and he was only two feet away.
His silence was far more disarming than anything he could have said.
The marks on my collarbones pulsed with every step, taunting me.Everything was fucked up, broken, and never going to work out between us no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise.
I was so screwed.So, of course, I opened my damn mouth.Words came out.
"The Skybond marks…” Apparently, I was going to talk about all this bullshit whether I was ready or not.I kept my eyes on the path."Are they reversible?"
"Is that what you want?"
The question hit me in the chest like someone had swung a sledgehammer."I'm asking a purely scientific question.”
"No."Quiet.Certain."You are not."
I stopped walking.
No.I was not.I needed to know what would happen if I was forced to leave here.Leave him.What would happen to him.To me.
The second cliff base was twenty meters ahead.Obsidian rising sheer and dark above us, threaded with crystal veins that caught the pale morning light and gave it back cold and electric.The stored charge in the deposits pressed outward against the morning like a held breath.
I turned around.
His eyes were on my face.They were always on my face — thorough and direct, seeing everything without even trying.Silver in the morning light, steadier than last night.The color of cloud cover with the sun directly behind it.
I looked at him, the thoughts in my mind causing physical pain.I know what you sound like when you sleep.I know where your pulse runs fastest.I know the exact weight of your arm on my waist and the taste of your kiss.I know what it feels like to come apart in your arms.And I will be haunted by you for the rest of my life.
There would never be another man like him in my life.No one else would ever make me feel the way he did.I knew that was the truth.I knew almost nothing else about him.
My marks pulsed.
His matched.
A different thought arrived, quieter.More dangerous.I had to leave to protect him.What would that do to a man—an alien—whose planet just wrote my name in lightning across his nervous system?
I had been so busy surviving my own emergency, I hadn't once thought about his.
He found a crashed human on his planet.Carried me through a storm.Sat with me through the bond forming in the dark of a cave and delivered that information carefully, making sure I didn't panic.He had asked nothing I wasn't ready to answer.Let me set every pace.Slept with his arm around me like I was worth protecting.Never once made it about what was happening to him.