Page 30 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"Let me see it."

She was already moving around the fire. Sitting beside me. Close. I could smell her — clean now, her own scent unmasked by the bathing, warm and organic and devastating.

"Kel. Shoulder. Now."

I pulled the undershirt over my head.

She was quiet for a moment. I felt her response through the bond — a sharp spike, then heat, then something slower and warmer beneath both. Her face supplied the translation: surprise at the extent of the wound, anger that I had not mentioned it. The warmer thing, neither of us translated. Her eyes moved across my chest, my arms, the full extent of the markings now visible on my torso. The geometric patterns that ran along my ribs, over my shoulders, down my sides. They were all active. All glowing. For her.

"That's... a lot of glowy lines," she said. Her voice was slightly different. Slightly rougher.

"The markings extend across most of my body."

"I see that." She swallowed. Then shook her head slightly, as if clearing it, and focused on the wound. "This isn't minor. This is a three-inch laceration that's been rubbing against fabric all day. You're lucky it's not infected."

"Valorian biology is resistant to most⁠—"

"Shut up and hold still."

She cleaned the wound with water from our supply. Her touch was gentle despite her sharp words. Careful. Practiced. She had done this before — tended wounds, managed injuries. On her planet, in the jungle, she must have treated herself and others regularly enough to develop this quiet competence.

She muttered as she worked. "Stubborn idiot aliens who don't tell people when they're hurt. Walking around bleeding through their shirts like it's nothing. Like it's masculine or whatever the alien equivalent of toxic masculinity is. Toxic Valorianity. I'm coining that."

I had learned, by now, to recognize the rhythm of these statements. The cadence rose at certain points, the final phrase landed with a particular emphasis, and the resonance's heat shifted from the spike of genuine irritation to something lighter — warmer — that I had no Valorian framework for interpreting. She was angry AND producing entertainment simultaneously. My species did not combine these functions. We were angry, and then separately, at designated intervals, we were not angry. She appeared to do both at once and find the overlap pleasant.

Her fingers traced along the wound edge, cleaning debris. And her fingertips grazed the glowing lines on my skin.

I stopped breathing.

Every pathway lit. Not just at the contact point, everywhere. Every line on my body answered in a cascade of light that I could not suppress, could not dim, could not control. The resonance translated the touch of her skin against my most sensitive pathways. There is no appropriate comparison. There is no frame of reference in my experience. Her fingertips on the bioluminescent pathways felt like being seen. Fully and completely at the cellular level. As if every barrier I'd built between myself and the world dissolved at the point of contact and there was nothing left but her.

She yanked her hand back. "Sorry! Did I hurt you?"

No. The opposite. So much worse than pain.

"You did not hurt me," I managed. My voice was not steady.

"Your whole body just lit up like a—" She stopped. Stared at me. At the bioluminescence covering my skin, still blazing, still refusing to dim. At my face, which I suspected was not as composed as I needed it to be. "Kel."

I could not look away from her. The fire was to our right, purple light mixing with the blue-white glow from my skin. Her face was illuminated by both. Her eyes, more green than brown in this light — my own senses had become absurdly attuned to the details of her, cataloging the shift in iris color under different wavelength exposure, which was NOT information I needed — were wide and searching.

I caught her wrist. I didn't decide to do it. My hand moved and closed around her wrist, and I could feel her pulse under my thumb, rapid and accelerating. The resonance sang with the contact — her heartbeat and mine, syncing in the space between us.

She didn't pull away.

We stared at each other across the space that separated us: a hand's width, no more. I could count the freckles across the bridge of her nose. Seventeen. I had counted them before, at a distance, without ever giving myself permission to.

"What does the glowing mean, Kel?" she whispered.

Every answer I should give — resonance compatibility, irreversible first-tier recognition on my side, your body's presence makes my biology believe you are the most important being in the known galaxy — piled up behind my teeth. My markings were answering her in a language her species had never evolved to read, and I was hiding behind that illiteracy like a coward.

I released her wrist. "Rest. We leave at dawn."

"No." She held my gaze, disappointment sharper than anger. "I've asked enough. The next time this comes up, you answer me. All of it."

Then she crossed to her side of the fire and lay down with her back to me. No argument. No joke. That silence was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

I sat by the fire for the rest of the night, spending sleep fractions I no longer had to spend. The glow across my skin held steady, aimed at her sleeping form across the flames, and I composed and discarded one hundred and forty-seven ways to tell her the truth.