Thrum

The world melts away. I am not stranded in deep space, not the last surviving member of a doomed crew, not alone in the world. I’m held by the heat of him, the pulse of blood through veins, the judder of his breath as he inhales, ruffling my hair. And then comes the distant, enveloping, aural cocoon of that distant hum — permeating me from epidermis to aorta, reaching in with invisible fingers and holding me.

Holding me.

You’re fine, Ami. The reminder doesn’t come from me. It’s not spoken aloud or even in the spark of unconscious thought. It’s from elsewhere, outside of me, maybe even traversing the path of the hum that fills my thoughts.

You’re fine.

I am fine. More than fine. My fear and anxiety seem to melt away as if they never were. Dorian has me.

His hand snakes up my back, feather-soft, hesitant, but flame-hot. I inhale sharply as his fingertips feather at my neck, then cup the nape. And then his fingers are buried in my hair, intimate and thrilling. I gasp but make no move to untangle myself from him. Why should I? His touch is comfort. His voice, delicate in my head, is a comfort.

Is it his voice, telling me I’m fine? Is he speaking to me subconsciously somehow, his words winding through my brain stem like a drug? The thought, vague as it is, brings me back to myself. I feel my body stiffen, as if from far away; as if I’m dreaming, and the alarm is beginning to blare, but I’m trapped in the cloudy unreal, the inescapable vision. But all of this is real. I am truly here, in the docking bay of Dorian’s alien ship, and my crew is dead.

“I’m sorry,” Dorian murmurs, halting, his voice muffled. He’s buried his face in my hair. His breath is hot on my ear. “There was nothing I could do.”

Like a pale light flickering on, a thought cuts through the fog: he’s upset. Sad for me. Trying to comfort this soft human who drifted into his corner of space. But something in his voice betrays him — he didn’t mean to say what he just did. Or perhaps he thought I wouldn’t hear it.

He senses my hesitation, this moment of clarity, and his body stiffens.

Looking up at last to meet his gaze, I’m again struck by the blackness of his eyes, the depth and scope. It’s like I’m looking out the viewscreen and into the universe, pricked with far-distant stars, none of which do anything to brighten the umbra. I’m both adrift and trapped like a rabbit by a fox. And he is the fox, shadowed in dusk.

“I know that,” I murmur, my voice thick with weeping. “Of course there was nothing you could do.”

He glances away, then back to me, and the power of his gaze has lessened. I’m released.

I breathe deep, and with the flood of oxygen to my lungs, my face no longer buried in Dorian, in the soft part of him where shoulder meets chest, discomfort crawls in my gut.

Not human. He’s not human.

He waits as if to see if I’ll bolt, or if I’ll stay and let him continue to enfold me.

I should be afraid of him.

But I’m responding to him like a strange, unearthly drug. I want to know every inch of Dorian. Somehow he is an island in the storm-swept sea of my loneliness and grief.

“What are you?” I ask, and I realize that I’m clutching his shirt in white-knuckled fists, holding him hostage. Willing him to answer, as if anything he says will illuminate this nightmare ship, my broken comms array, the damaged fuel tank. My dead crew.

Patiently, almost sadly, he smiles down at me, his moon-pale face framed elegantly by soft, jet-black hair. None of it is real. A painting, a beautiful facade of a thing that is not from Earth. “The last of my kind.”

An evasion. “But what is your kind?”

He hooks a finger under my chin, tipping me up to him like an offering, our gazes locked. My chest and heart are loud with flowing blood, as if my pulse is rushing all around me, threatening to drown us in red, red, red. His voice is little more than a whisper. “I’m whatever you want me to be, Ami.”

The shiver down my spine is a humiliation, the sharp ache between my legs a betrayal. I’ve just laid my friends to rest, left their corpses to lie untouched by the passage of time, zipped up and safely kept in their stasis pods like the preserved kings of ancient Earth. My hot face is tear-stained. My heart aches and aches.

And I am frightened, I tell myself. I should be. I am.

“You’re safe,” Dorian says, as if my skittering thoughts are plain as day to him.

“But what kind of… of being are you,” I manage, his finger still under my chin, so utterly real I imagine I can feel the whorls of his fingerprint, the faint pulse of blood under his skin.

The corner of his mouth lifts, and the smile is so disarming, so un-alien, that I’m helpless to it. My body arches toward him ever so slightly. It occurs to me that I should have asked this question the minute I arrived on his ship. That I should have been taking lengthy notes since the moment I disembarked from Pioneer, learning his language, his physiology, his habits. I’m a scientist, and Dorian is the mission. But I’ve been so tired. So overwhelmed. So confused. It’s as if a cloud has been hanging over me, obscuring reality through a viscous haze.

And now he’s here, eliciting the exact wrong sorts of emotions. The wrong bodily responses.

With what feels like an impossible amount of mental strength, I take one step away from him. One step, but it’s enough to separate us, for him to drop his hands, for his heat to stop enveloping me like I’m oil and he’s flame.

He blinks — momentarily surprised, I think — and then his expression crumples, his brows coming together in remorse, his lips twisting. “You need more sleep,” he says, backing away with one hasty step. The gulf between us feels unbearable. “I see it in your eyes, they’re hazy with exhaustion. You’re grieving.”

I’m fine, I want to lie. Come back, I want to beg, even though I’m the one who moved away, who put this chasm between us. But he’s right. I’m sleep-deprived, grieving. All I’ve eaten in who knows how long is one nutrient bar. I’m every kind of fucked up.

And he’s an alien. I press the heel of one hand to my eye, savoring the dully painful burst of light and color.

“I’ll take you back to your room,” Dorian says, holding out a hand.

I want to take it, but I’m suddenly afraid that if I do, I’ll never want to let go. Instead, I nod, shoving my hands into the pockets of my jumpsuit. He bends to pick up the pothos, holding it as if it’s a priceless artifact, and he its steward.

I trail after Dorian and the pothos, back through the empty corridors, and I try to think of things I know: The gnarled tree outside my childhood window, the one I wasn’t allowed to climb even though its branches were so thick and shaded with leaves in the summer. Lily’s uneven teeth when she smiled, one front tooth just slightly overlapping the other, the smile she hated even though it softened her. Lying on the beach in a wet swimsuit, sand between my toes and stuck to patches of skin. The pop of a blackened candle wick, thick and fragrant smoke swirling upward on a rainy October evening. Fresh coffee in the morning, so hot it almost burns. The relief of the first night I spent in my own place, the month I turned eighteen, utterly broke but finally free.

By the time we return to my room, my mind is in another place altogether. In my head, I’m back home, and no one is dead, and I’m as close to happy as I ever got, on Earth.