17. Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
Julia
Three days since I cooked his grandmother’s soup recipe, and something between us has shifted, not loudly, but the way a room changes when the light does.
When he knocks at one o’clock, I’m already facing the door. I have been for a while, which I refuse to examine too closely.
“Come in.”
Rhazgar enters, and I nearly drop my mug. He’s not in his usual dark slacks and button-down. He’s in cargo pants and a fitted t-shirt under a lightweight jacket. The shirt is doing absolutely nothing to disguise how wide his powerful shoulders are.
“Good afternoon.” He sets the ceramic container on my coffee table. “I’ve brought your midday preparation.”
“You look…” I take the container, buying myself a second. “Different.”
“The cultural center canceled today’s session. Pipe repairs.” He watches me sample the broth. “I don’t have to cook there today. Their loss.”
“Yep. Their loss is my gain.” I wrap both hands around the container.
“I have a proposal.”
My heart knocks against my ribs. “Oh?”
“You’ve been inside for seventeen days.”
“The ankle,” I say, which is only half a lie. It’s been four days since Dr. Shah told me to put the crutches away, and it barely registers when I walk anymore, no swelling, minimal pain.
“I don’t intend for you to walk.” His voice is deep and intimate.
The memory of being carried: his muscles, his warmth, the way he moved as if my weight was nothing, does something embarrassing to my pulse. Part of me wouldn’t mind an excuse to be in his arms again.
“You mean—”
“There’s a place in the foothills.” He glances toward the window, then back. “A small plateau. The terrain there reminds me of home. I go there when I need to remember what home felt like.” A pause. “I’d like to show you.”
That stops me completely. He’s been careful with me for weeks. This doesn’t feel careful. This feels like trust.
“I’ve prepared provisions,” he adds, which is such a Rhazgar thing to say that my chest aches a little. “If you’d like to come.”
“Right now?” I look down at my yoga pants.
“If it’s convenient.”
“Give me five minutes.”
I throw on jeans and a sweater and my one pair of hiking boots, which lace loose enough over the brace to be almost comfortable. After brushing my hair, I fasten it with the carved bone comb I’ve worn every waking minute since he gave it to me. I swipe on a little mascara. For no reason.
When I emerge from my bedroom, Rhazgar is at my bookshelf with a book open in his hands, reading. He looks up.
His gaze travels from my boots to my face, and something in him goes quietly warm. “You look prepared for adventure.”
“I look like I raided a lost and found,” I say. “Let’s go before I reconsider.”
He carries me through the lobby, past Mrs. Craft from 2B, who raises her eyebrows so hard they nearly fly off her face, and I stop caring before we reach the front door.
There’s something about being held by Rhazgar that makes self-consciousness feel like a different person’s problem.
He’s so steady. Like being carried isn’t an imposition, it’s just the obvious solution.
He opens the truck door one-handed without jostling me. I miss his warmth the moment he sets me down.
The drive winds up into the foothills. The farther we get from town, the more he seems to settle into himself. His shoulders drop a fraction. His grip on the wheel eases.
“I found this place three months after the Emergence,” he says, watching the road. “When I couldn’t make Earth feel like anything but wrong.”
“Did it help?”
“It reminded me that different doesn’t mean lesser.” A beat. “I needed reminding, some days.”
We park at a gravel turnout, and he comes around to gather me out of the seat with the same care as always, easing me against him in exactly the right place.
“You always know exactly how to hold me,” I say.
“I’ve been thinking about it.” His gaze never leaves mine.
Somehow that affects me more than if he’d kissed me.
The trail is steep and rough, and I don’t feel a single step of it. His breathing doesn’t change. I watch the trees thin above us and try not to think about how delicious it feels to be in his arms.
“You’re not even winded.”
“WarmHearth physiology. High-altitude origins.” He ducks under a branch without breaking stride, the motion so fluid it barely registers. “Our blood processes oxygen more efficiently.”
“Meanwhile, I’d be dying on this trail.”
“You’d be managing.”
“Gasping and complaining.”
“Managing,” he repeats, and I can hear the amusement he’s not quite showing.
“Maybe we’ll come back when my ankle heals,” I say. “So I can do this properly.”
“I’d like that.” Simple. Certain. Like it’s already decided.
My stomach does a slow warm turn.
Then the valley unfolds before us, and I stop thinking about anything.
He doesn’t put me down when we reach the summit. Just shifts his hold slightly, turning us both toward the valley, and I stop expecting to be set down.
The whole valley is laid out below us, buildings catching the morning light, the river a winding blue cord through it all, mountains beyond. It’s the kind of view that makes your problems feel correctly sized.
My focus turns to Rhazgar’s face.
Whatever he carries in town, the studied distance, the constant calibration, it’s not here. He looks at those mountains, and something in him just opens.
“The Scarred Peaks of home weren’t like this,” he says quietly. “But the bones of it are right. The way the stone sits. The altitude.” He’s quiet a moment. “My grandmother used to say the land has a language. If you’re patient, you can learn to read it.”
He sets me down on a flat boulder near the edge and makes sure my ankle is elevated. Then he shrugs off the pack, spreads the blanket, rich WarmHearth geometric patterns across the stone, and lifts me onto it before turning to the food.
Small containers that have apparently been keeping things at precise temperatures emerge in an order that suggests considerable forethought.
“You packed an entire mountaintop dining experience.”
“I packed lunch.”
“Lunch does not usually involve textiles.”
He glances down at the blanket. “The stone is uneven.”
“And the tea?”
“The wind at this elevation causes rapid heat loss.”
“Uh-huh.” I narrow my eyes at him. “You read articles for this, didn’t you?”
A pause.
“Some.”
“Rhazgar.”
“Some were lists.”
“They’re called listicles.”
He nods. “Yes.”
“Did any of them contain the phrase romantic picnic essentials?”
“The phrasing was similar.”
“Did Cosmopolitan plan this picnic?”
“In part.”
I look around at the blanket, the warm tea, the carefully packed lunch, and the valley spread out below us.
“I am never making fun of your research methods again.”
We eat in the kind of quiet that doesn’t need filling. Occasionally our hands brush reaching for the same dish. I let myself notice the jolt of awareness that arcs through me each time.
“After the Emergence,” I say eventually, “when you were looking for a place like this, was it just about the landscape? Or was it about surviving the grief.”
“Both.” He gazes out at the mountains. “Many of us didn’t survive the transition.
Not physically… in spirit. They couldn’t find enough of their homeworld to reconstruct themselves.
I had my grandmother, and after she went to the ancestors, I had her recipes.
Her voice in my head when I cooked. I had purpose. ” A pause. “And I had this place.”
I reach over and put my hand on his. He goes very still.
“You’ve done more than not fail her,” I say. “Whatever you think you owe her, you’ve given it. And then some.”
His fingers turn and fold around mine. The difference between his green skin and mine has stopped registering as contrast. It just looks like his hand and my hand.
“I spent six years preserving what she gave me,” he says. “Carrying it. I think I forgot that living things aren’t meant to be preserved. They’re meant to be passed on.”
I feel the weight of what it cost him. And what it might mean that he’s finally set it down.
“She would be proud of you,” I say. “Your grandmother. That you got there.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Yes,” he says finally. “She would.”
He raises our joined hands slowly and presses his lips to my inner wrist. Holds them there for a moment as he spears me with his gaze.
“Rhazgar.”
He reaches up and cups my face in his hand, gentle, almost reverent, the midday light warm across his features, and kisses me.
His kiss deepens, his tongue tracing the seam of my lips in quiet question. I open for him eagerly, and the taste of him, spicy and clean, makes me dizzy with want. His hand slides from my cheek to tangle in my hair, angling my head to deepen the kiss further.
A low rumble builds in his chest, not the growl I know, something deeper, something that resolves into a purr. The sound vibrates through me and I press closer before I’ve decided to move.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard. His eyes have darkened to molten gold, and I can see what it’s costing him to hold still.
“Julia.” His voice has dropped to something I feel more than hear. “I want you to know what this means. I’ve never brought anyone here.”
He stops. His jaw works once, some careful, rehearsed continuation visibly collapsing before it reaches his mouth. A short breath escapes him, almost a laugh, entirely at his own expense.
“I had more to say than that,” he admits. “I rehearsed it, on the drive up. I don’t remember any of it now.”
“Maybe you didn’t need it,” I say.
His eyebrows lower, like that hadn’t occurred to him.
I look at him for a long moment, this careful male who planned a picnic and carried me up a mountain and just lost an entire prepared speech somewhere between the truck and this moment.
That he chose to bring me here at all, unrehearsed and unsteady, matters more than anything he could have practiced saying.
“I know,” I say softly. “I think I’ve known for a while.”
Something in his expression shifts: not surprise, but the stillness of a man who has been hoping for something and is only now allowing himself to believe it.
When he pulls back, his cheek rests against mine for a moment. Neither of us speaks. The valley spreads out below us, ordinary and distant, and up here everything feels correctly sized.
Then I reach up and find the tip of one pointed ear.
He goes absolutely still. The opposite of pulling away.
I trace the shell of it, the smooth taper to the point, and feel the shudder that moves through him. The purr shifts register: not the low, contented sound I know. Something with more heat in it. It travels from his chest into mine.
His tusk grazes my cheek as he angles closer, cool ivory against my skin. I don’t flinch. I turn into it. His breath catches.
His hand slides beneath my jacket, beneath my sweater, and his palm settles against my waist. It’s blazingly hot, spanning my entire side. I gasp.
He stills, waiting.
“Don’t stop,” I say.
His thumb traces up along my ribs, and I’m reaching for him, fingers curling into his collar, pulling him closer, when his cheek drops to mine.
“Julia.” Controlled at the edges. Only just.
I shift toward him and feel exactly how not-controlled the rest of him is: hard and unmistakable against my hip. He doesn’t pull back. His jaw tightens as he lets me feel it. “We’re on a mountain,” he says.
“I noticed.”
“Your ankle.”
“Also noticed.”
The purr has gone ragged. His hand at my ribs stills, not withdrawing, just holding, present and warm, and I understand that he’s stopping because he chooses to, not because he wants to.
“Soon,” he says. One word.
“Soon,” I agree.
He packs the picnic in thoughtful silence. When everything is put away, he lifts me into his arms again as though there had never been any other possibility.
“Is this comfortable?” he asks.
“Very,” I assure him, pressing a soft kiss to his jaw.
His arms tighten around me. Neither of us seems inclined to interrupt the quiet. By the time we reach his truck, the sun is setting, the sky ablaze in orange and pink.
As he drives us home, his hand finds mine across the console. Our fingers interlace. The simplicity of it undoes me.
The mountains catch the last of the light behind us.
I find I don’t mind not knowing what comes next. Not with his hand warm over mine and something quietly certain taking root between us.