Page 117 of Thexan

“By efficiency?”

“No,” he said, and the answer came without hesitation. “By you.”

The words went through me in a straight line, simple and devastating in the way only he could manage. I lifted my head and looked at him, my smile fading into something softer.

“You really do mean to make a place here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“With me.”

“Yes.”

“Even if it takes time.”

“Time is acceptable when the objective is permanent.”

My throat tightened. “You keep saying things like that, and I’m going to start thinking you’re secretly romantic.”

“I am not certain the classification would be inaccurate.”

That startled a laugh out of me, and he watched it happen with the faintest shift in his expression, as though he had just discovered a new tactical advantage and intended to remember it.

I rose onto my toes and kissed him.

He answered slowly, not with the urgency of survival or the fierce reassurance that had followed our argument, but with the patient certainty of someone who understood that this moment did not need to be seized before it disappeared. His mouth moved against mine with deliberate care, his hands steady at my waist, and the bond between us deepened with a warmth that felt less like fire and more like the glow of something built to last.

When I drew back, I didn’t go far.

“This is ours now,” I said.

His gaze moved briefly around the small room, taking in every inadequate inch of it, then returned to me. “It will be.”

“No,” I said, resting my hand over his chest. “It already is. We just have to make it fit.”

His hand covered mine, holding it there against the steady beat beneath his scaled skin.

“Then we begin now,” he said.

I looked at the room again, at the narrow bed, the crowded table, the trunk in the corner, and all the ways my life had been too small for what was coming. Then I looked back at him and felt the truth of it settle inside me with a quiet certainty that no longer frightened me.

“Yes,” I said. “We begin now.”

His hand tightened around mine, and when he bent to kiss me again, there was no urgency in it, no fear beneath it, no question left unresolved between us. Only the warmth of his mouth, the steadiness of his body, and the knowledge that whatever we changed in this room would only be the first visible sign of what had already changed in us.

The world outside would still need us.

The settlement would still question, adapt, and test the shape of his place among them. There would be work tomorrow, and the day after, and every day after that, because survival never stopped asking for more.

But tonight, in the small room behind the infirmary, with his hands on me and the future opening in a way I could finally see, I let myself choose the part of life that was not duty.

I chose him.

And when he lifted me carefully, mindful even then of his healing side and my smaller human frame, I wrapped myself around him and let him carry me toward the narrow bed that would not be ours for much longer.

Two months later, summer was in full bloom. Three months had passed since Thexan first stumbled into my dwelling, injured and afraid, and I still sometimes caught myself marveling at how completely the Mesaarkan warrior had changed my life.

He had been quiet all morning, his golden eyes watching me with an intensity that made my skin tingle. Now, as the sun began to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink, he took my hand, his fingers lacing through mine with a familiarity that still made my heart race.