8. CHAPTER EIGHT
The jump to D’yuti wasn’t bad at all. I was getting better at this—less anxious now that I was with Zhari.
After the shows here, I always ended up on the loading deck with a Nebula Cosmo in one hand and whatever snacks Yuki had managed to pass around in the other.
Zhari would find me eventually, once she’d changed out of her concert outfit and into something more comfortable.
She’d drop onto the nearest crate, and I’d hand her a bottle of whatever was cold.
The first night, she sat close but didn’t touch me.
The second night, her knee pressed against mine, and neither of us moved away.
The nights that followed, she leaned her head on my shoulder while Lyn told a story about a show on Tessara where the gravity rig malfunctioned and the whole front row floated six feet off the ground.
That must have been what Pia’re had been talking about.
When the others eventually drifted off to their bunks, we’d stay out beneath the stars. She’d shift so she was facing me, her legs tucked beneath her, and we’d talk about nothing important in voices that grew quieter the later it got.
She’d play with the ends of my hair while I talked. I’d trace circles on her knee while she told me how she felt when she performed.
Once, she fell asleep mid-sentence, and I just sat there watching her breathe. Her glow had dimmed to almost nothing, her face completely soft, and I thought, This is the version of her nobody else gets.
I wanted to protect it so fiercely that it scared me.
The emotional intimacy was hard.
Knowing that we were meant for one another didn’t automatically make my feelings for her appear, despite my years of obsessing over her.
I was trying to get to know the real her, and I wanted her to get to know the real me.
Sometimes we didn’t even talk. We just sat together, exchanging looks that lasted too long and smiles that lingered for hours afterward. Her fingers found mine beneath a blanket during a late-night viewing-bubble session and stayed there.
I noticed her hands a lot, and it was becoming an issue. I thought I was developing some sort of fixation on this woman’s hands. I’d never even cared about hands before—not on anyone.
Zhari had long fingers, and she moved them when she talked. When she was running through a song, she’d tap rhythms on whatever surface was closest: her thigh, the table, the arm of the couch. I would watch her do it and forget what I was drawing.
She noticed me noticing. I could tell because her glow would flicker just a little at the edges of her cheekbones, and she’d look away first, pretending to be interested in something else.
Lyn noticed too.
Because Lyn noticed everything.
“You know you two are painful to watch, right?” she said one afternoon in the mess.
Both of us were eating Space Dogs while Yuki messed around with his phone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I scoffed.
“You literally just drew her hands for forty minutes,” Lyn said, gesturing at my sketchbook with a chopstick. “I counted. You drew seven different versions of her left hand. That is not the behavior of someone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m an artist,” I said. “Hands are hard. Everyone draws hands a lot.”
I started to fidget with my pencil.
“You drew her hands,” Lyn said. “Her specific hands. With the ring she wears on her index finger. And the scar on her thumb from that lighting-rig accident two tours ago.”
She puckered her lips, playfully mocking me.
“That is not a hand study, Vada. That is a love letter.”
“It’s a sketch.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s it.”
“It looks a lot like you’re falling in love with her,” she said with a grin.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I was falling in love with her subconsciously, and my brain was the only part of me that wasn’t up to speed.
“She said she’d be patient with me,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like we haven’t, you know…”
I raised my eyebrows and smirked.
“We just haven’t fully bonded. This is huge for a human. I didn’t know this was a thing across species.”
“Yeah,” Lyn said. “She is. And you are sitting here drawing her hands like a woman possessed. So maybe the question isn’t whether she’s patient enough. Maybe the question is why you’re still making her wait when you clearly don’t want to.”
“But if your aura locks onto someone else’s,” I muttered, my eyes on my sketchbook, “do you actually feel something for them? Or is it more like… ‘Well, I guess this is who I’m bound to now’?
Because I don’t want to be someone’s obligation.
I want her to want me. Me—not just… whatever the bond says I am. ”
I tapped my pencil against the page.
“I think this is what I’ve been struggling with. It’s also such a short period of time.”
“Velans move fast. It’s just in their nature. While I'm not a Velan, my species also has aura bonding but, I’ve never had a bond, obviously,” Lyn said, waving her chopsticks for emphasis. “But my parents did. And this is what they told me.”
She leaned forward, her voice dropping slightly.
“Once they saw that aura connection, everything else fell away. Their whole world narrowed to each other. That was it. That was the axis. Their hearts beat, and they felt it answer in their own chests.”
She tapped the table lightly.
“My mother said it felt like something deep and old waking up in her bones—like she had always been carrying this love around, and the bond just gave it a name.”
She paused, then continued.
“It wasn’t about having to choose him. It was that there was no choice that made sense anymore except him. And in that connection, they didn’t just see an aura. They saw every version of each other—what they’d been through, what they were afraid of, what they wanted.”
She shrugged.
“They loved each other with all of that in the picture. So from the outside, it might have looked like she was just following a bond. But from the inside?”
Lyn shrugged again.
“It was a lot more than that.”
Lyn described it so beautifully. Why was I wasting so much time overthinking?
My logic was simple. I knew that if I bonded to her, it wouldn’t just be a crush, a tour fling, or something I could laugh off later. It would be a line I couldn’t uncross.
Her life and mine would be tied together in a way that didn’t care about distance or careers or the fact that she had grown up beneath alien suns while I was just a human living below minimum wage in a gloomy apartment.
But part of me wanted that so badly it hurt—to be the person whose name her whole world narrowed down to. To be seen all the way through and chosen anyway.
And part of me was terrified that if I let it happen, I’d find out I wasn’t enough.
Good grief, I sounded like I was in some sappy rom-com. But the truth was that it was real, and it felt like standing on the edge of something huge and irreversible, trying to decide if I was brave enough to step forward.
“You’re very wise for someone currently dual-wielding a Space Dog and Nebs,” I said. “Her world and mine are so different. I’m not sure I can give her what she needs. I just… need to sort out my thoughts.”
“Humans really are such finicky creatures,” she teased.
“Yeah, yeah. We can’t all be little nymphomaniacs like Velans,” I shot back.
“I, for one, think this could be a good thing for Zhari,” Yuki said without looking up from his phone. “She needs someone. She has been spicy lately, and I think she just needs to—”
Yuki gestured with two fingers in front of his lips, then slowly licked between them.
Lyn scoffed.
“Ew. You’re giving background NPC.”
Yuki let out a groan. “You know it’s true, Lyn. Since Vada has been here, she has mellowed out a bit.”
He winked at me.
I nervously laughed because I was sure he knew we’d been fooling around.
“What are you doing on your phone, anyway? Talking to a babe yourself?” I teased.
“If you must know, no. Not that I don’t get babes. I totally do.” He turned his phone toward me. “But I’m playing NebulaPets. I just earned enough StarCoin to finally buy my Earth Dragon the Shiny Pet House 3000. I even had some left over and got him a lava outfit.”
He beamed. He looked very pleased with himself as he smiled and continued pressing buttons on his phone.
“Oh, I didn’t know you played NebulaPets. I have a Cosmic Hamster named Sidney that I’ve been trying to level up. I’m only level twenty-one, and it’s been such slow progress just getting there.”
I let out a sigh and leaned forward slightly to watch him play.
“You guys are lame,” Lyn butted in. “I’m going to pester the sound guys. There is this totally hot blonde who I know has been checking me out.”
Lyn smirked and left the table.
“Have fun,” I teased.
I tapped my wrist comm and opened the NebulaPets app. I brought up my Comet Hamster and flashed the holo toward Yuki.
“Here, open your hologram, and let’s be friends. I think making new friends gives you, like, one hundred StarCoin.”
“Oh, that’s totally high-frequency. I know they did that a while back for new players. Thanks for letting me know. I’m going to make the sound guys join up.”
Yuki flashed his holo toward mine. We let them sit there for a moment until we heard a soft zzziiipp, then they broke apart.
Yuki closed his phone and stood up.
“Well, enjoy the rest of your time before the show tonight. I’m going to get me some more StarCoin.”
He winked and walked away, picking up Nova from one of the tables.
The show that night was at a midsize venue carved into the side of a cliff. It had a glass roof where you could see the stars.
I watched from the side stage, perched on a road case with my sketchbook open across my knees.
I’d seen the set a bunch of times by then. I could move along to every transition, knew exactly when the lights would drop for the bridge, and felt the bass shift a second before it hit.
But it still knocked the air out of me every time.