“After that, I took the escape pod. Drifted for two days before a salvage ship picked me up. They dropped me at a station, and I disappeared into the slums.” I tied off another stitch. “I was good at disappearing. Good at surviving. Not so good at living.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Surviving is just not dying. Living is...” I searched for the words. “Living is having something worth staying alive for.”
He was quiet. Listening. Giving me space to finish.
“Torek found me six months later,” I said. “I was living in a cargo container in a station slum, stealing food and stabbing anyone who got too close. He walked right up to me, big as a mountain, and said he had a farm that needed tending.” I laughed, soft and rough. “I tried to stab him too. He just caught my wrist and said, ‘Not bad form, but you’re telegraphing.’”
“That sounds like him.”
“I asked him why he was bothering with me. Why he didn’t just walk away like everyone else.” I set down the needle. The final stitch was done. “You know what he said?”
“What?”
“‘Because someone bothered with me once.’” I smoothed a bandage over the stitches, careful and precise. “He never told me who. But I understood. Someone had given him a chance when he didn’t deserve one, and he was paying it forward.”
“He taught you everything. How to grow things. How to fix things. How to defend things worth keeping.” His voice was low. Rough. “How to be a person again, instead of just a survivor.”
I looked up. Surprised that he remembered my words from earlier. That he’d been listening that closely.
“You’re remarkable,” he said.
“What?”
“What you survived. What you built after.” His eyes were steady on mine. “Most people would have broken. You grew.”
“I had help.”
“You let yourself be helped. That’s harder than people think.”
He looked at me the way he had in the kitchen, before the alarm. Like I was something worth studying. Something worth knowing.
I should have pulled back. Should have finished cleaning up, put distance between us, remembered all the reasons this was a bad idea.
I leaned forward instead.
His breath stuttered. I heard it, saw his chest hitch under the fresh bandages. His hand came up, fingers brushing my jaw, and I remembered this. His hand on my face before the alarm. The thing he’d wanted to say.
“Anhara.”
My name in his voice. Low and rough and wanting.
I didn’t wait for him to finish the question.
I kissed him.
His lips were warm. Slightly chapped. He tasted like copper and something darker, something that was just him. For a moment he didn’t move, didn’t breathe, and I thought I’d miscalculated, thought I’d broken something that couldn’t be fixed.
Then his hand slid into my hair and he kissed me back.
Not gentle. Not tentative. He kissed me like he’d been waiting for permission, and now that he had it, he intended to use it. His other hand found my waist, pulled me closer, and I went willingly, climbing half into his lap before I remembered his wound.
I pulled back. “Your stitches.”
“I don’t care about my stitches.”
“I do. I just spent twenty minutes putting them in.” I rested my forehead against his. “And I’d rather not have to do it again because you were impatient.”
