She should not have used that word. “It’s when you feel uncomfortable about something. Self-conscious. Like you’ve done something wrong or foolish.”
“Sleeping with me,” he said slowly. “Embarrasses you?”
“No. Yes. It’s—” She dropped her face into her hands, groaning. “It’s complicated.”
“Explain?”
“I can’t explain. I don’t have the words. You don’t have the words.” She raised her head, desperate to change the subject.“Tell me something about you. Where you came from. What you remember.”
Sorrow flashed across his face for a second before his usual neutral expression resumed. “Remember… pieces. Fragments. Place under the ice. Duty.” His hand moved to his chest, pressing flat over his sternum. “Here. Something… empty. Missing.”
“Missing?”
“Others,” he said roughly. “Others like me. We…” He struggled for words. “Keep memories of… many.”
He was a guardian,she thought.A protector of something important.“What happened to them? The others?”
The silence stretched. When he spoke again, his voice was very quiet. “Gone. All gone. I am…” He paused, searching. “Last?”
The word hung in the air between them.Last.The last of his kind. The last guardian of whatever buried place he’d emerged from.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “That must be…” She couldn’t find the words either. What did you say to someone who’d woken up to find everyone they’d ever known was dead? “I’m sorry.”
He nodded once, acknowledging her sympathy without requiring more of it. “And you,” he said, changing the subject. “Why here? Alone?”
It was a fair question, and one she’d never been good at answering. The truth was too pathetic to share. She shrugged. “I like it here. The solitude. The independence. I’m my own boss. I make my own decisions. No one telling me what to do or how to do it.”
The words sounded hollow even to her own ears. She’d spent her life convincing herself that she preferred being alone, but in the space of a single conversation with this alien who wasn’t really an alien, that carefully constructed narrative was starting to unravel.
“Alone,” he repeated, and she could swear there was disapproval in his tone. “No family? No mate?”
“No mate,” she said firmly, ignoring the way her body reacted to the word. “And my parents are gone. They… it was a long time ago.” She stood abruptly, needing to move, to put distance between them and the direction this conversation was heading. “I came out here because I wanted to be alone. I wanted to build something that was just mine. No partners, no investors, and no one else to answer to.” She laughed, and it came out more bitter than she’d intended. “I was so focused on being independent that I isolated myself completely. Most days I go weeks without talking to another person.”
“But this is what you want?”
“I thought it was.” The caveat surprised her. “I thought I wanted to be alone. To not need anyone.”
“And now?”
She looked at him—this impossible being who’d crashed into her carefully constructed solitude and upended everything she thought she knew about herself.
“Now I’m not sure.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached across the space between them, his hand hovering in the air near hers, his claws retracted. Offering contact but not demanding it.
“Alone is… cold,” he said. “I remember cold. Many years of cold. Sleep without dreams, without others.” His eyes met hers. “Not want to be alone again.”
Something ached in her chest, and she placed her hand in his.
His scales were warm against her palm, smooth and textured at once, and his fingers curled around hers with a gentleness that made her throat tight. They sat there—human and not-human, woman and ancient being, two people who had been alone for far too long—and for a moment, the howling storm outside seemed very far away.
“Teach me more,” he said quietly. “I want to understand you.”
And despite every wall she’d built, every defense she’d constructed, every carefully cultivated habit of solitude and self-reliance?—
She began to talk.
She told him about the mining claim. About the years of saving and planning that had gone into it, the bureaucratic nightmares of getting licensed for independent prospecting, and the backbreaking work of setting up the habitat and equipment by herself.
