“Aiko was confused by your absence, you know” I ranted. “She brought two plates of food to our chamber and didn’t understand why you weren’t with me. A newly mated god leaving behind his bride. Looks very legit.” I crossed my arms, a reflection of his pose. All the extra rolled-up silk bunched around my elbows.
“Do you want to know how it works?”
I blinked, my arms falling to my sides. “Do I want to... What? What are you talking about?”
“The starfinder. You were standing in it a moment ago. I assume you were curious.”
“Right now, I’m more curious about why you completely disregarded your end of our bargain this afternoon. What was it you said earlier? If you can’t fake it in front of the Sionnachans, you’ll never be able to do it in front of the other stone sky gods?”
Still, he didn’t fucking answer. Instead, he pushed off from the doorframe and strode into the room, a shadow taking shape.
I wanted to shout, to make him respond, make him justify himself to me. You fucking left me here!
But that was just too pathetic. If he could be cool and detached, then that was just fine. I’d be that way too.
Wylfrael had lost his vest at some point during whatever the hell it was that he’d been doing. His markings cast a dim blue glow over everything, including me, as he approached. His gaze glowed, too, the colour of clear Canadian skies in winter, so beautiful it made my ribs constrict. His gaze was intense on me, more penetrating than his detached tone of voice would have had me believe. His eyes dipped to my neck, my collarbones, my chest. I realized, nipples growing taut in the cool air of the fireless room, that my robe had started sliding down one shoulder, exposing cleavage. I thought about grasping the material and pulling it closed, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to make myself small. To hide myself and acknowledge I was vulnerable. Instead, I raised my chin, heart pounding.
Wylfrael didn’t say anything else and he didn’t touch me, though, for half a hammering heartbeat, I’d thought he was going to. He walked around me, his movements creating a brush of air on my exposed skin that made me shiver. He went past the tube thing in the centre of the room to the wall across from me, grasping something on the wall – a lever? – that I hadn’t noticed before.
He cranked the lever, and I gasped, my head turning wildly.
The entire room was peeling apart. Cold air rushed in, but I barely felt it through the shock. The top of the tower split, more than a dozen pieces opening until they came to rest in a flat ring, jutting outwards like the petals of a frozen flower.
We were no longer in a room but on a roof.
The view was incredible. It wasn’t obscured the way it was in the tunnels. From here, I could see the dark stretch of forest, the jagged wall of mountains, and, God, the stars.
Light pollution apparently wasn’t a thing on Sionnach. I tilted my head back, dizzy and humbled at the glorious spray of light overhead.
“Amazing,” I breathed. I’d almost completely forgotten Wylfrael was there until he answered me.
“You were here for more than thirty days before I got here. You never once looked at the stars?”
I shook my head, still looking upward. “We were inside the ship at night. I studied them on the computers, using human data and maps, but I never got to...”
To stargaze. The way I’d done since I was a child, looking ever upward, awe-struck and aching to know more. My dad’s house in Northern Ontario was in a rural area, and the stars were almost as bright as these ones now.
I thought of my first telescope, the one Dad had bought me when I was twelve. He’d run a small hardware store in Thunder Bay, and though he worked incredibly hard, money was always tight on his single income. I’d relied on scholarships and income from part-time jobs to go to university. Even at twelve, I knew that the gift had taken him all year, if not more, to save for. Though I’d wanted it desperately, I’d tried to tell him to take it back, that it was too much. Nothing’s too much for my star girl, he’d said with that gruff, almost shy smile of his, like he was embarrassed by the simple act of being happy.
My dad loved everything to do with the Earth. Hiking and fishing, snow and dirt and trees. My obsession with space had always perplexed him, but he’d honoured it anyway, with trips to the Toronto Science Centre and, when we could afford it, visits to the Cosmodôme in Montréal. And then, on my twelfth birthday, with the telescope, painstakingly wrapped but still somehow looking like a mess, a giant tube of crumpled, starry wrapping paper held together with about two hundred strips of clear tape. It had been a monumental gift – a message in layers of sparkly stars. Telling me that even if he didn’t understand the things I loved, he loved me, and that was enough. I thought of that telescope gathering dust in my childhood home, no one to take care of it, no one to claim it, and grief struck me like a blow.
I breathed in sharply, reeling, cold burning my lungs. Wylfrael was at my side in an instant. He pulled the flaps of my robe closed so forcefully I thought that he might rip the fabric.
“You’re too cold. We’ll come back another time. When you’re more appropriately dressed.” There was something in those last words, something about the way his fingers lingered at the base of my throat, that distracted me from the pain of the past and dragged me back into the shattered present.
“I’m fine,” I said, though my teeth were chattering now. “Show me the starfinder.”
I wouldn’t leave until he showed me what it was. For some reason, I needed this. More than I felt like I needed air.
I thought he’d argue with me, but he didn’t. Instead, he grasped my shoulders and spun me, walking me back into the tube. It was tight with both of us in here, and Wylfrael’s bulk crowded against my back. His heat curled powerfully around me, warming my back and expanding in the tube until it almost felt downright cozy in there. Cozy. With a moody alien god I’m about to fake marry... Good grief.
“How did you know I was up here?” I asked. I couldn’t see him like this. I stared straight ahead, through the transparent tube.
“It wasn’t exactly difficult to find you,” he replied. “You left a trail of open doors up the stairs in your wake.”
“Oh.” Subtle, Torrance.
Wylfrael’s hands were still on my shoulders, solid and heavy and so warm I had to fight the urge to nuzzle into him like a kitten.
“Besides,” he added, his hands smoothing inwards over my silk-clad shoulders until they came to rest nearer my neck. “Even if you hadn’t, I’d have just followed your scent.”
“My scent?!” I gasped. “Are you serious?”
He had a sense of smell that strong? Did he have a single physical ability that was merely mediocre?
“Of course I am,” he said, bending, his words stirring my loose hair. “Especially when you wear something as flimsy as this.”
“You’re the one who got it for me, so don’t you dare complain about the clothing!” I said, temper rising. “Especially after you disappeared the way you did! You still haven’t explained that to me, by the way. Why you left.”
Wylfrael tensed. I felt it all down my body, from his fingers on me to his chest and abdomen against my back.
“You were doing that human thing. Your eyes getting all wet and shiny.”
“You mean crying?” I huffed. “So? Humans can cry for a lot of reasons, you know. Not just when we’re sad. Anytime we’re overwhelmed with emotion. Even joy. So, you can’t get mad at me for that. I wasn’t failing at playing a good fiancée. Many humans even cry at their own weddings, so you should have considered it a rehearsal run.”