Chapter 13 #3
Then I closed the small distance and pressed my lips to his.
It wasn't gratitude. Or not only that. And it wasn't loneliness, though I felt that too.
It was something more specific: the recognition, finally acknowledged, that this person had been showing me who he was every single day we'd been here, in every fire he built and every meal he brought and every morning he held himself carefully back at the river tree line because I'd asked him to.
He'd been showing me that he was someone who paid attention, who adapted, who understood that care looked different from control.
I kissed him because I had been paying attention too.
I gave him room to pull away. I kept it soft, barely pressure, a question more than a statement.
He went completely still.
I started to pull back.
And then he kissed me back.
Careful at first, tentative, like he wasn't entirely sure he was reading the moment correctly and was moving slowly enough to check.
His lips were warm, surprisingly gentle, and he kissed me like something he wanted to do right rather than just do.
One hand came up to cup my face, his palm large and warm against my jaw, the gesture so deliberately tender that it made my eyes sting for an entirely different reason than a minute ago.
We stayed there a long moment, just that. Lips and warmth and the sound of both of us breathing.
When we separated, his eyes opened, and I found him watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before. Open. Wondering. Like something he'd believed impossible had turned out not to be.
I watched him try to speak. Watched the effort move through him, the concentration, the jaw working around something that wouldn't quite come.
Then, rough and deliberate and costing him something visible, the words arrived.
"Don't cry."
I felt them like a physical thing.
"Enslak." I touched his face. "You're talking."
He nodded slowly, his eyes on mine. His mouth moved again. Another pause. Another visible effort.
"You safe." He held my gaze, making sure I was receiving what he was trying to give. "With me."
Four words. Halting and imperfect. But precise, chosen, aimed at me with clear intent.
I pressed my hand against his cheek and felt him lean into it slightly. Not the instinctive leaning he'd done in the earliest days, the way he responded to any gentle touch without appearing to fully register it. This was deliberate. He was choosing it.
"I know," I said. "I know I'm safe with you."
His eyes closed briefly. When they opened, the relief in them was something I wanted to hold onto.
His hand was still against my face. His thumb moved, slow and considered, tracing just below my eye.
"My Niki," he said.
Not a claim. Not the way possession usually sounds. He said it the way you say the name of something you've been afraid of losing, something you're still not quite sure you get to have.
"Your Niki," I confirmed.
His breath changed. The warmth in his eyes deepened, and I recognized what moved through them, the same thing I'd felt when I kissed him and he kissed me back.
Attraction, fully awake, and going exactly nowhere for the moment.
Because he was still healing. Because the words had just come back to him today, halting and hard-won, and that mattered. Because whatever this was between us, it was worth doing carefully and well.
"We should rest," I said gently. "My leg needs it. And you took claws across both arms."
He looked down at his arms. Back at me. A sound in his throat that acknowledged the truth of it.
"But Enslak." I waited until he met my eyes. "I'm glad I'm here. I want you to know that. On this planet, with you. I'm glad."
I watched him hold that. Watched him turn it over.
Then, slow and warm and belonging entirely to him, he smiled.
I kept touching him, running my fingers through his pelt, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath. And he just melted. Became completely docile, completely trusting, completely at peace.
George's words about the Vaktaire bond came back to me then, unbidden. At the time, I'd thought it sounded beautiful. Romantic, even, in an alien sort of way.
Now, feeling Enslak's massive body relaxing under my touch, hearing that deep, rumbling purr, I understood it differently.
This wasn't just comfort. This was need.
He'd been drugged, tortured, broken down to something barely sentient. And through all of that, some part of him had been screaming for this, for the simple comfort of a gentle touch, for someone who chose to stay close not because they had to but because they wanted to.
"We're going to be okay," I whispered, more to myself than to him. "We're going to figure this out. I'm going to help you find your way back."
He rumbled in response, his massive shoulder pressed against mine, his breathing slow and steady and content.
And sitting there in the mouth of that cave, on an alien planet filled with dinosaurs and impossible beauty, with this person who was healing one careful day at a time, I felt something I hadn't felt since the moment I'd been shot in Hell's Kitchen.
Hope.