She told him about the polar ice and the way it sang during temperature shifts, and the strange beauty of the aurora that sometimes danced across the Martian sky. She told him about the silence and how she’d grown to crave it, and she saw a matching light in his eyes.
She told him about her parents and how they’d only ever needed each other. How her father had died in a transport accident and her mother had followed him because she couldn’tsurvive without him. How she’d taken their small repair shop and sold it to fund her trip to Mars instead of continuing the family business. She didn’t talk about the guilt that still surfaced sometimes, but she felt it nevertheless, and wondered if he could sense it.
Through it all, he listened. Not just with his ears but with his entire being, his attention fixed on her like nothing else existed. His vocabulary expanded in real-time as she spoke, his mind making connections she could almost see forming behind his eyes. And when she finally ran out of words, he was quiet for a long moment.
“You are afraid,” he said.
“What?”
“Of needing. Of being needed.” He squeezed her hand gently. “You build walls. Make yourself… small. So no one can see what you want.”
The accuracy of the observation felt like a blade slipping between her ribs.
“That’s…” She tried to pull her hand back, but he didn’t release her. “You don’t know me well enough to?—”
“I know,” he said. “Because I am same.”
She stopped struggling.
“Keepers do not need,” he continued, his voice soft. “We protect. We preserve. We do not ask for ourselves.” Something dark moved through his expression. “I was taught this. Before the cold. My purpose was others, never self.”
“And now?”
Those ice-blue eyes traveled over her, leaving an almost palpable heat behind it.
“Now I want,” he said. “For first time in… very long. I want.”
The air between them seemed to thicken. His thumb stroked the back of her hand, and she felt the touch all the way up her arm.
This is a terrible idea,some part of her brain insisted.I don’t know what he is. I don’t know what he’s capable of. I don’t?—
But she was tired of being afraid. Tired of walls and solitude and the quiet voice that told her she wasn’t built for closeness.
“What do you want?” she asked.
His eyes held hers.
“This,” he said. “Here. With you.” His free hand rose, hesitated, then touched her cheek with a gentleness that made her breath catch. “I want to not be alone.”
It should have been a simple statement, but she heard the deeper meaning beneath it, the loneliness that stretched back into centuries she couldn’t imagine.
She leaned into his touch, her eyes closing.
“Me too,” she whispered.
The admission cost her some of her precious independence, some of the carefully maintained distance she’d always thought defined her. But she felt lighter for it, like she’d set down a weight she’d been carrying so long she’d forgotten how heavy it was.
His hand moved to cup her jaw, and she opened her eyes to find his face impossibly close.
“Jaz,” he said, and her name in his rough, otherworldly voice was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard.
Before she could overthink it, she closed the final distance between them and pressed her lips to his.
CHAPTER TEN
Jaz.
Her name echoed through Adjar’s mind as her mouth moved against his, soft and warm and perfect. This was not an act he had experienced before, at least not that he could remember, but he was instantly and totally certain that nothing in his long existence had ever felt this right.
