Page 50 of Taken By the Alien Killer
Her laugh is a short, disbelieving exhale. “You’ve got a list?”
“Of course,” I say, and let the edge soften. “Sneed’s lemon policies. The way the west tower elevator insists on stopping two centimeters shy of level. The sound Kaspian makes when he overthinks a joke. Peace when it asks too much. Silence when it asks more.”
She nudges my knee with hers, a small grin arriving like sunrise. “Add: the ceremonial air freshener in this absurd bed.”
“That one is moving up the ranks,” I concede.
She sobers. “I was lonely,” she says. “Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that makes you do loud things and call them fun. I had all the rooms in the world and none of them fit. I wanted—” She stops, and the old etiquette tries to come back and put its hand over her mouth. She removes it. “I wanted you to look at me and see a woman. Not a treaty. Not your assignment. Not a child who keeps stealing your bishop.”
I feel the Bishop in my pocket like it turned to heat. “I saw a woman,” I say. “The moment I let myself. It was not a good day for discipline.”
She searches my face as if I might be lying to be kind. “I was afraid I’d never be enough,” she says in a rush. “That I’d be too much in all the wrong ways and not enough in all the right ones. For my parents. For the continent. For the line. For you.”
There’s a funny burn in my chest I only ever got on the worst days in the fighting, when a man would sayholdand everyone would, and then nobody could tell if they were brave or just out of choices. “You are enough,” I say, careful, steady. “For all of it. For me, you are precisely enough, and that has nothing to do with crests or lands or the weight of other people’s plans. If I had been allowed to choose a word before I knew language, I would have chosenyou.”
She blinks hard, inhales like the cabin ran out of air and just remembered how to make more. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
We breathe in the same small room with the ship humming its indifferent lullaby. She tilts her head, studying me the way a person studies a cliff path and decides to trust their feet. “Tell me something light,” she says, and the corner of her mouth lifts. “A private joke. I need one that doesn’t taste like lemon.”
“The first time you beat me,” I say. “At chess.”
Her eyes flare. “Which one? Because there have been several, sir.”
“The first,” I insist. “You were fourteen, you had jam on your fingers, and you moved the knight like it had wheels.” I let the taste of that afternoon bloom—the courtyard light, the smell of hot stone, her hair a riot and her laugh louder than propriety. “I could have taken the bishop two moves back. I didn’t. I wanted to see what you’d do.”
“Youspottedme?” She sits up, scandalized. “You smug giant.”
“You found the line anyway,” I say, and my own laugh escapes, low, a sound the bed absorbs. “You set the trap and then you watched me walk into it and made the exact same face you make at fireworks.”
“You meantriumph,” she says, preening, then softens. “You kept the bishop.”
“I did,” I admit. “It lives in my pocket more than it lives on any board. It smells like your perfume and poor decisions.”
She snorts. “Good. I always wanted my legacy to smell faintly of scandal.”
We lie back down, shoulder to shoulder now, the sheet a warm weight over our hips. She turns her head and presses her lips lightly to the inside of my wrist, right where the pulse lives. It’s a kiss that could be a joke, a comfort, a claim. My fingersopen, then curl, finding her hair at the nape, thumb tracing the tender skin there as if reassurance can be written.
The ship hums like a satisfied animal and the cabin holds its breath for us. Low light grazes the curve of her cheek and turns her hair into molten copper; the cut at her lip has gone from angry to tender. I am a big, black-scaled blasphemy on silk—seven feet of barely disciplined heat and all my old edges—but she looks at me like I’m a harbor, not a weapon.
“I’m not going to be careful with words anymore,” she says, voice steadying as she uses it. “I want you. I choose you. Not because I’m cornered. Because I’m home when I’m in your hands.”
The noise that leaves me is not entirely civilized. “I choose you,” I answer, the vow finding its old uniform and deciding to wear it anyway. “Every day I am allowed. Every day I am not, I will choose you under my tongue and in my bones, and it will be the same.”
She leans in and kisses me—soft first, patient, as if we have time and intention both. The cut at her mouth is tender; I map my pressure around it. Her hand slides along my jaw, fingers pausing at the ridge of scar near my left horn, touching like she’s checking a story I told. The ship hums. The bed shifts. We keep it slow.
“This time,” she breathes, mouth at my cheek, “no running. No ship screaming. Nobody knocking. Just… us.”
“Yes,” I say, and the word is big enough to hold every other one.
There are a thousand ways to go to war and I have learned more than I wanted. There are fewer ways to make reverence without kneeling, and I use all of them now. I take my time. I let hands say what orders never could: you are safe; you are treasured; this is the body I would fight a god for and the breath I intend to keep. Her laughter slips in when I kiss the bruiseat her jaw as if to apologize to it for existing; my breath falters when she presses her mouth to the seam of a scar the doctors told me would always ache in winter and it doesn’t ache now.
“Tell me if it hurts,” I warn, because the cut at her lip is new and the universe is cruel.
“It hurts not to,” she answers, and her eyes are steady, and that’s the only permission I need.
We move with the kind of patience people mistake for restraint. It is not restraint; it is savor. She teaches me the map of quiet places that still sing—behind her ear, the hollow of her throat, the spot where ribs soften into breath; I teach her the ways my hands can be heavy without being hard, the ways weight can be a shelter and not a cage. We speak between touch—half-sentences, silly things, honesty disguised as teasing.
“Your hands are too big,” she whispers, smiling against my shoulder.
