13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It had been three days since she’d asked for space.
Three days on the same planet, yet worlds apart. I watched her through broadcast screens and from the back of rehearsal rooms, all while a low, steady pulse lingered beneath my ribs—a soft, familiar melody fading just out of reach.
She still moved through my days. Bus rehearsals, wardrobe checks, pre-show run-throughs. Even so, she retreated to the city when the sun went down instead of coming back to our bed.
She was lovely with the crew, effortless with the team.
It was only with me that she shrank back, quiet and cautious.
She’d give me a soft “Hey” in the hallway or return a small smile if I gave her one first. But behind it was a wall I didn’t know how to cross, and the distance was killing me.
Every time she left a room, the space around me felt wrong, as if gravity had forgotten how to apply itself.
By day four, even my drawings looked off.
“You’re going to burn a hole in the table if you keep staring at it like that,” Lyn said, dropping into the seat across from me in the mess hall.
I blinked and looked down. My utensil was stuck in a piece of something that had once been lunch. I’d been mashing it into paste without noticing.
“Sorry,” I muttered, pulling the plate a little closer as if I could protect it from my anxiety.
Yuki slid into the seat beside Lyn, balancing a bowl of Tomalian, which was some sort of alien cereal. It was trying to levitate out of the milk, so he tapped one floating piece back down with his spoon.
“You look like you’re about to throw up or murder someone,” he said mildly. “Should we be worried?”
“I vote murder,” Lyn said. “More interesting.”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
Lyn narrowed her eyes.
“You’re not fine,” she said. “You’ve been haunted for days. You only drank half your Galaxy Tea.”
She gestured to my half-empty cup.
“You haven’t made any jokes to Yuki or me. That’s not fine. That’s… possessed.”
Yuki nodded solemnly.
“Also,” he added, “you called me ‘Tev’ earlier today and then apologized to nobody while you were getting food from the dispenser. So…”
“Okay, maybe I’m not fine,” I admitted.
Yuki’s gaze flicked down to my wristband, where the little heart charm from Orin’s market still hovered just above the surface in a faint glow.
“This is about her, isn’t it?” he asked quietly.
“She’s still at the hotel,” I said. “She comes here for work stuff, and then she’s gone. We say ‘hi.’ We talk about schedules or set lists. Then she leaves again.”
I pushed my utensil around the food some more, it skidded uselessly across the ceramic.
“I keep thinking she’ll message me,” I added. “Or knock on our door. Or… something.”
I shrugged, feeling stupid and small.
“But she doesn’t.”
Lyn glanced at Yuki. Some silent communication passed between them.
“And you,” Lyn said, “have you gone to her?”
“I tried once,” I said. “I went to talk to her when she went to rehearsal, but I just stood at the door. My hand wouldn’t move. I couldn’t knock.”
“Why?” Yuki asked gently.
Because she’d said, Don’t follow me, and I’d heard it like a command, not a boundary.
Because I’d spent my whole life being told I was too much or not enough, and I didn’t know how to push past someone else’s no when it was about their heart.
Instead of saying any of that, I picked at my food.
“She was so upset,” I said. “She was… hurt. And she was right. It looked bad. Saying yes to Tev in one conversation and telling her I wasn’t ready when the universe literally set us on fire.”
Yuki rested his forearms on the table.
“Do you want this?” he asked.
“The job?” I said. “Yes.”
“No. The bond,” he said. “Her.”
“Yes,” I blurted out. “Stars, yes. I was coming to tell her that when she left. That I want it. All of it. Her. The forever thing. The stupid socks and morning breath and everything.”
I dragged a hand down my face.
“I just needed time. I needed to get used to the idea of having a forever someone after just meeting them. My species doesn’t do this. Biologically, we don’t, so it was just a lot to hear when I was literally minding my business and enjoying a concert.”
Yuki smirked.
“Then what are you doing sitting here mashing your lunch?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I’m allowed to do,” I said, frustration bubbling up through the fear. “She said not to follow her. She needed space. I don’t want to be the person who barges through someone else’s boundary because I’m scared they’ll leave.”
Lyn shook her head.
“There’s a difference between ignoring someone’s boundaries and fighting for them,” she said. “You’re not talking about camping outside her hotel and playing power ballads at three in the morning.”
She paused.
“Please don’t do that, actually. I’ll be the one who gets yelled at.”
I snorted despite myself.
“You’re talking about going to her once,” she continued. “With your chest open. Saying what you should have said the first time. If she still says no, then you back off. But right now, you’re letting fear make the decision for you.”
Yuki nodded.
“Zhari scares easily when it’s about her,” he said. “She acts like she doesn’t, but she does. She walks into crowds like it’s nothing, but when it comes to letting people in, she’s… careful. You’re allowed to meet her where she’s scared.”
I looked between them.
“So your professional opinion is…?” I asked.
“Tonight’s the last Tessara show,” Lyn said. “She goes on at nine. You should be there.”
“She asked for space,” I said. “I can’t just show up at her concert.”
“You’re not showing up at her concert,” Yuki said. “You’re showing up for her. There’s a difference.”
The bond pulsed once, faint but present, as if it were listening.
My heart climbed into my throat.
And then, somewhere between the fear and the desperate, stubborn hope, something clicked.
“I have an idea,” I said.
Lyn raised an eyebrow.
“What kind of idea?”
“The big, stupid kind,” I said. “The kind I always do on paper, but in real life this time.”
I pushed my plate away and stood.
“Where are you going?” Yuki asked.
“I need markers,” I said. “And glitter. And every piece of glow-in-the-dark anything I can find in the craft-supply bin.”
Lyn and Yuki exchanged a look.
“That’s our girl,” Lyn said.
***
The arena was a living thing by the time I got there.
Outside, the crowd moved in rivers of light—wristbands glowing, holo-tickets flickering, bodies pressing toward the entrances. Food vendors hawked glowing skewers. Kids ran past with neon face paint. The air hummed with that specific frequency of a few thousand people about to lose their minds.
I’d spent the afternoon in the bus’s craft nook, hunched over a piece of board I’d pulled from a packing crate, with every marker, glitter tube, and glow strip I could find.
My hands were still flecked with silver.
The sign wasn’t pretty in the way my professional work was pretty. It was pretty in the way things were pretty when you made them while shaking and crying, meaning every single letter.
I WANT TO SOLAR CAR WITH YOU
The letters were big and slightly uneven, the O’s ringed in glitter, the word SOLAR painted in yellow with little rays coming off it. I’d drawn a tiny car at the bottom with a smiley face.
It was ridiculous.
It was the most me thing I’d ever made.
I tucked it against my chest, face down, and found my way to the floor section. Lyn had somehow gotten me a crew-adjacent pass—not VIP, not backstage, just close enough to the stage that I could see Zhari and she could see me if she looked.
The lights dropped.
The crowd screamed.
And then she was there.
Zhari walked onto the stage as if she’d been born on it. The lights caught her jacket—dark rose and cropped, catching the beams—and her hair was down. Her aura glowed along her collarbones like bioluminescence.
She looked untouchable.
She looked like a star.
She looked like the woman I had let walk away.
The bond thrummed beneath my skin, loud and annoying.
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” I whispered to my chest.
She opened with one of her bigger hits, “Frequency.” I clutched the sign to my chest and watched her move across the stage, dancing and jumping around.
She always looked like she was having so much fun.
Three songs in, she hadn’t seen me. Or if she had, she hadn’t let on.
The fourth song started softly—just her and a synth, the band pulling back. The melody was sweet and bouncy, unmistakably that Y2K space-pop sound she loved. It was the kind of song that felt like it belonged on a mixtape someone had made for you in a school hallway.
Meet me at the Milky Way
We’ll dance until the stars go gray
You’re the signal in my stereo
Be my frequency, don’t let me go—
There it was, those totally glitchy butterflies in my chest again.
I loved how she made me feel, all giddy and excited.
This was the song. The one she’d been humming in the bus kitchen at two in the morning when she thought everyone was asleep. The one she’d played for me once, shyly, before any of this—before the bond, before the hotel, before I’d made her feel like a risk I wasn’t willing to take.
I turned the sign around and lifted it above my head, slowly waving it from side to side.
My arms shook. The board was heavier than I expected, or maybe my arms were just weak from how hard my heart was hammering.
I held it over my head, the letters facing the stage, the glitter catching the lights and scattering little prisms everywhere.
I WANT TO SOLAR CAR WITH YOU
For a second, nothing happened.
Then I saw it—the flicker. The tiny break in her posture. Her eyes, scanning the crowd out of habit, catching on the sign.
Catching on me.
She stopped singing.
The band kept going for two bars before they realized. The synth wavered, uncertain. Then silence, thick and electric, spread across the stage.
The crowd murmured. Holo-screens flickered, trying to figure out what was happening.
Zhari stood at the edge of the stage, her mic loose in her hand, staring at me.