Page 64 of Taken By the Alien Killer
No words. I don’t have any that would make this better. She doesn’t offer any that would make it easier to leave. She is on me in two heartbeats, and I meet her like I’m starving, because I am.
The door seals behind us with a hush. Dust floats in the thin light where starlight tries to make an argument through old glass. The room smells like cold metal and paper and her. Her hands find my collar; mine find her face, palms full of heat and bravery. She makes a sound I have bled for. I answer with the mouth I have used for orders and silence and now this, the first honest work it’s done in weeks.
“Rayek,” she says against me, and it breaks me more gently than I deserve.
“Star,” I breathe, and the name is a home I don’t own.
Desperation doesn’t ask permission. We don’t have room for polite. We have room for now, and the shape of each other, and the dozen ways we learned to be careful and the one night we refuse. She tastes like citrus and sleep loss and the small, bright taste that is only her. I taste like iron and resolve and failure and I only breathe when she is this close.
“Tell me you’re real,” she says into my mouth.
“I’m too heavy to be a dream,” I try, and her laugh hitches into something less safe.
Clothes become regrets. The cloak hits the floor. The mock-up gown learns humility in a spill of pins and whispered fabric. My hands are large and I have done damage with them; tonight they are a different kind of weapon, and the target is every part of her that fear tried to lay claim to. Her fingers map my scars like a cartographer who refuses to leave the ugly places blank. “Mine,” she murmurs, and I don’t correct her.
The old chess table—scuffed wood, two broken inlays where a teenage elbow taught it gravity—accepts our weight as if it’s been waiting to be part of a better game. We find the rhythm that leaves the world out of the room. It is fierce because we have been gentle for too long; it is primal because this house wants us civilized and we are done performing; it is a promise because words would make it small and our breath refuses smallness. She says my name; I say hers; the telescope pretends not to watch.
After, the room breathes with us. The glass fogs at the top corners where the night forgot to be cool. The chess pieces in the drawer rattle a little when we shift, indignantly alive. She lies half on me, hair spilled, skin hot where mine is hotter, heartbeat arguing with mine until they find a compromise.
“We can’t keep doing this,” I say, because I am the man who carries the hard sentence into the room when everyone else is tired of hearing it. “We will drown in it and then pretend we didn’t choose the river.”
“Don’t,” she says, and the word is small and furious and alive. “Not now.”
I press my mouth to her temple; the skin there tastes like salt and dust and the ghost of rosewater she let the day get away with. “We need to say it when we have breath,” I answer, “because later we’ll need breath and not have words.”
She props herself on an elbow and looks down at me. The moon makes her eyes deep green, almost black. The bruise at her jaw is a memory now, not a mark. “Stop the wedding,” she says, simple as an opening move. “Please. Crash it. Burn it. Take me and let them sort out the rest.”
“You know I can’t,” I say.
“Why not?” Her voice is not a weapon. It’s a hand shaking me. “I love you.”
“Then don’t marry him,” I say, because the river can’t pretend it’s not the sea. “Choose anything else. Choose being hated. Choose being boring. Choose me and war and whatever comes of it, but choose.”
Her breath catches. She looks away—at the telescope, at the far dark, at a version of herself that was easier to be and is now dead. “It’s not that simple,” she whispers.
“It is,” I say. “Simple isn’t easy.”
Silence sits down between us. It’s heavy; it’s kind. We let it rest a minute. She lays her head back on my chest and listens to the thing the medic taught me to match to engines and artillery and her. My hand finds her hair; it has learned the way through without getting lost.
“You will hate yourself if you make me do it for you,” I say finally. “If I drag you, you’ll learn to resent the rope. If I stand in the aisle and make a speech, I will be the villain in a story that deserved a better hero. If I fight Kaspian, I will embarrass a man who doesn’t deserve the lesson. If I break Sneed, they’ll replace him with a worse priest.”
“I don’t care about any of them,” she says into my skin. “I care about us.”
“I know,” I say. “I care about the you that has to live in the morning. I won’t make a ruin of your courage by spending it on my timeline.”
She is quiet long enough that the night tries to take the room back from us. When she speaks, it’s small and true. “You’re leaving me.”
“I left,” I admit. “I made it halfway to gone, and then your message hit me like a hammer, and I crawled back under the walls and remembered all the exits Sneed thinks he invented. I came because I could not do otherwise. Not to interfere. Not to make a plan. To see you. To be seen by you once more.”
“You could stop it,” she says softly. “If you wanted to.”
“I want to,” I say, and the admission is a burn that cauterizes. “I want to so much it has a taste. But wanting and doing are not the same thing. If I break the door, you never get to learn how to open it. If I solve it, you never get to sayI chose.”
“I hate that you’re right,” she says, mouth aching against my shoulder.
“So do I.”
She sits up, fingers finding the edge of the table and worrying the old gouge where CynJyn dropped a rook and blamed me. She stares at our scattered clothes: her pins like tiny, guilty stars; my cloak a bad decision on the floor. “Will you come if I ask?” she asks without looking up. “If I send a message from the altar. If I say please.”
