Chapter 22
twenty-two
. . .
"Yes," she said again.
Her voice was shaking.
"Yes, I want to be your mate." Her voice cracked on mate and she didn't fix it.
"Yes," she said again, raw and wrecked. "That's my answer. That's been my answer since you caught me on the stage floor and I lied about being fine and you let me lie because you were too decent to push, and I have been lying to both of us every day since then and I'm done. I'm done."
Thorne’s hands found her face. Both palms cradled her jaw, his fingers spreading along her cheekbones, and his thumbs brushing the tears off her skin.
The frost bloomed where he touched her in delicate lacework across her jaw, her cheeks, and the line of her temple where his fingertips pressed.
Silver-white crystals formed on her warm, dark skin, visible to every person watching.
His mark. Their private language written across her in front of the whole world.
He kissed her.
The community erupted into a swell of cheering and calling out that broke the held breath of the clearing like a wave breaking against a shore.
Phoebe kissed him back with her hands fisted in the front of his uniform. The same way they'd been fisted on the stage floor the night he caught her. Her knuckles white in the dark fabric, her grip anchored in the solid wall of his chest, and his heartbeat under her hands.
Except that night she'd been falling. Caught mid-disaster.
The rigging coming down and his body around hers, and the three seconds that changed everything.
She wasn't falling now. She was standing.
Choosing. Her mouth against his with peppermint and frost on her tongue.
It was the taste of home, and she was done pretending it wasn't.
Thorne pulled back just enough to press his forehead against hers.
His breath came cold against her flushed mouth, each exhale visible between them, crystallizing in the narrow space between his lips and hers.
His hands were still on her face, and frost was still spreading across her skin in slow, lace-thin patterns she could feel forming like a second pulse.
"I will pack tonight," he said. Quiet. Just for her, though the clearing was close enough to hear. "We can leave on the next transport to Earth."
The words landed wrong in her chest.
Not because the offer wasn't real. She could see the cost of it written across his face.
But the man who had just read her a poem about wanting the woman underneath was offering to leave the life that had made him that man. This planet was woven into him the way her accent was woven into her voice. She couldn't let him pull it up.
She didn't answer right away.
She felt a shift. Subtle. The cold radiating from him intensified a fraction.
His expression didn't change. Not in any way the crowd would catch.
But Phoebe had spent weeks learning his face the way she learned music, and the fracture was there: small, sharp, insecurity flickering through the certainty like frost through warm air.
"That is, if you want me to come with you," he said. Quieter still.
The vulnerability in those words was so far from the composed Mentharian officer on opening night that Phoebe almost started crying again.
She took his face in her hands.
Sensation sang between their skin. His cold jaw against her warm palms. Frost forming where her fingers pressed, her heat meeting his cold at the exact boundary where sensation became electric.
The hard line of his jaw under her thumbs.
The skin she'd kissed and traced and pressed her mouth against in the dark.
Her thumbs found the sharp angles of his cheekbones, and she held him the way she'd held him the first time she kissed him in his doorway, all instinct and no permission. Except she wasn't stealing a moment this time. She wasn't leaning in before the panic could stop her.
She was here on purpose.
"I don't want to leave."
The words came out steady. Certain. Entirely hers.
"I spent my whole life chasing a recording contract because I thought it was proof I mattered.
" Her thumbs moved against his skin, and the frost followed, silver-white on her brown skin, their joined temperatures making something visible between them.
"I scrubbed my own accent out of my mouth to earn it.
I let a man take forty percent and tell me I was lucky.
I performed in every room I walked into because the real me wasn't what the industry wanted.
I believed that for so long, I forgot about the me who really existed. "
His eyes hadn't left hers.
"Then I came to a planet at the edge of space.
And a man who could hear every lie I told looked at me and wanted the version I'd been hiding.
He brought me tea I didn't ask for and walked me home every night and read my fear and my armor and my bullshit and never once asked me to be less complicated. He just kept showing up."
Thorne's throat moved.
"I have a family here. I have Ember and Kaelor.
And Ivy, who asked me the question I was too scared to ask myself.
And Ruby, who has never in her life had an inside voice, and I love her for it.
And Mia, who is definitely planning the party already.
And a choir of a dozen species who cannot hold a harmony to save their lives, and none of that — none of that — lives inside a recording contract on Earth.
"If the label wants me badly enough, they'll wait until Frostfall is over. And after that, we’ll figure it out together.
" She pressed her palm flat against his chest, over his heart, and the cold of him seeped through the uniform fabric and into her hand and settled behind her own sternum like something clicking into place.
"I am done making decisions alone and calling it strength. "
The expression on his face was pure relief.
His hands found her waist, pulled her against him, and his mouth found hers.
Evergleam had never been more beautiful than it was at this moment. And she was staying in it.