Page 120 of Thexan

“I’m more than good,” I breathed, tracing the ridges along his head with unsteady fingers. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this whole.”

He raised his head, and the look he gave me was something close to reverence. “Three months, and you still undo me completely, meora.”

“So are you,” I whispered, pulling him down for another kiss. “Holding you like this is no hardship at all.”

“I, too, enjoy it,” he replied, his thumb tracing my cheekbone.

I was content to have him in my arms for as long as it took, to feel his weight pressing me into the bed, and to be connected in this most elemental way.

We lay tangled together afterward, our breathing slowly returning to normal as his knot gradually diminished. The silence that returned was comfortable, companionable—the silence of two people who had found their home in each other.

When he finally withdrew, the emptiness lasted only a heartbeat before he pulled me against him, his scales warm from the heat we’d made together.

“I am yours, always,” he murmured in his native tongue, and I never got tired of him reminding me.

“And I am yours,” I said again, resting my palm over the steady beat of his heart. “For every one of those years.”

As we lay back together, naked in each other’s arms, I knew that this was where I was meant to be. The human healer and the Mesaarkan outsider, two beings who had found their counterpart in each other.

The mountain hummed around us, patient and warm.

I closed my eyes, anchored by the weight of him, and let the world narrow to this one.

Epilogue

Brynn

Two Years Later

The room behind the infirmary was no longer too small.

That still surprised me sometimes.

The work itself had been possible, but I remembered so clearly what it had been before Thexan came into my life: a narrow bed, a crowded table, a storage trunk in the corner, and just enough space for one tired medic to sleep between emergencies. I had called it practical for years because practical was easier than admitting I had never expected my private life to grow large enough to need more.

Now the back wall had been opened into the old storage space, the bed was wide enough for both of us, and Thexan had built shelves with the kind of precise efficiency that made Tanner complain and then secretly copy the design for half the settlement. A second window had been cut into the outer wall the previous spring, positioned to catch morning light without sacrificing structural integrity, which was how Thexan had described it. I had described it as beautiful.

Both were true.

I stood at that window now with my morning tea cooling in my hands, watching Thexan cross the yard with Mico trotting beside him and two smaller children hurrying to keep up. Mico was six now, long-legged and endlessly curious, and he had long since stopped asking whether Thexan could breathe fire. These days, his questions were more practical, which meant they were also more dangerous.

Yesterday he had asked how many bad men Thexan could stop with one hand.

Thexan had considered the question far too seriously before I told him not to answer.

The settlement had changed around us, not all at once and not without difficult days, but steadily enough that I could look back now and see the shape of it. People no longer stepped out of Thexan’s path unless they had somewhere else to be. Tanner argued with him openly, which had become Tanner’s preferred form of friendship. Callie trusted him with the children near the fence line, though she still scolded him if he explained structural failure in terms that gave them ideas.

He had become part of the settlement the way stone became part of a wall: not soft, not ornamental, but necessary once set in place.

And still, sometimes, I caught people watching him with the memory of old fear in their eyes.

I didn’t resent them for that.

Fear didn’t disappear because life had improved. It faded through repetition, through proof, through ordinary days stacked one on top of another until the impossible became familiar. Thexan had never asked to be loved by everyone here. He had only learned how to remain without forcing anyone to accept him faster than they could manage.

That might have been one of the hardest things he had ever done.

I heard the door open behind me and felt him before he crossed the room. The bond between us had changed over time, though not by weakening. It had become part of the way I understood the world, steady and quiet beneath everything else, no longer something I noticed because it was new, but something I would have noticed instantly if it were gone.