"What are you thinking about?" he asked.
She did not look at him.
"Books," she said.
"Books? Since when are you into books? You hate reading."
She chuckled. "I hate textbooks. I like books with stories."
"What kinds of stories?"
She didn't answer immediately. The honest answer was complicated. It required her to admit that she'd been reading things she shouldn't have and feeling things she shouldn't have felt.
"Love stories," she admitted nonetheless, because she wasn't a coward. "Human love stories."
He was quiet for a long moment. "Did you like them?"
She snorted. "Obviously. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been consuming them at a rate of one every three days. I got addicted to those stupid books."
"What did you like about them?"
She turned to him. "The feelings, the kissing, and all the other stuff that I'm supposed to start doing but can't bring myself to do."
The words left her mouth before she had decided to say them, and once they were in the air, she could not pull them back, andthe silence that followed was so complete that she could hear the small sound of Pavel's breath catching.
He was looking at her as if he was seeing her for the first time and didn't know how to respond.
"Aren't you going to say something?" she challenged him.
"I'm speechless."
"Why?"
"Because you were honest with me. That was brave of you."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Did I ever give you a reason to doubt my courage?"
"Not in battle. But this is different. You are admitting to feelings, and I know how difficult that is for you."
She shrugged and turned away from him because it was painful to look at his handsome face.
She heard him shift on the rock. She heard the small sound of his hand moving, the displacement of air.
"That's a shame," he said.
"What is?"
"That you can't bring yourself to do any of those things. I can help you with that."
Her heart did something inside her chest it shouldn't have. Kra-ell physiology was supposed to be more disciplined than this. Her heart was supposed to beat at a rate appropriate to her level of physical activity, but even though she was currently sitting on a rock, her heart was racing.
It was the blood.
She hadn't had blood since yesterday. The lightheadedness she was now experiencing was a physiological response to nutritional deficit and not a response to the male sitting half a hand's width away from her on a rock under the moon.
"Help with what?" she asked, even though she knew exactly what he'd meant.
"May I kiss you?"
