The air was colder now. It approached the frigid season. Soon, her village would celebrate the change with a grand feast, as the darkness of the days lengthened.
The flower petals in the meadow were shrinking away from the cold.
"Yes." She said nothing more.
"Will you not tell me?"
"Atlas," she pronounced softly. "Because you are a bearer from the sky, holding up the Stars with the weight of your shoulders. That is why I have chosen this name for you. Do you like it?" she asked.
His face would be unreadable to most, but not to her. She saw the slight dip to his throat. The lowering of his eyes.
"It is striking, but not as much as the one who gave it to me," Atlas said. "Say it—my name."
"Atlas, Atlas."
"Vesperin," he murmured. "And Atlas."
He did something then that surprised her. He turned, took her face between his hands, and pulled her close. He gave her a single breath before his lips met hers. Her first kiss. It was gentle. When he pulled away, she could only stare.
"Why did you?—"
His tongue traced over his bottom lip, as if to chase the taste of her. "I have wanted to do that for some time. I could not help myself."
She blushed. "How did you know… about that?" She could not bring herself to call it what it was—kissing.
His hair fell over his brow. His features had grown sharper the longer he had lived on this planet, as if the pointed edges of the Stars were clinging to him. "I know what humans do. I have watched for a—long time." He spoke as though a long time were something no one like her could understand.
She wondered what a being of the Stars would consider a long time.
"What kind of things have you watched?" She remembered him asking her to tell him about humans. "Why did you wish to know what humans were like if you already knew?"
He answered only her second question. "Watching and knowing are different." His fingers traced over the sides of her face as if to commit her shape to memory. "You can watch a farmer sow seeds, but you do not know what it is to feel the give of the dirt under your plow or the toil in your bones until you do so yourself. I wanted to know how you felt as you described the things I have only watched."
She leaned into his palm. "This is one thing I did not know, either. We discovered it together."
"You have never been kissed?"
"I have now—by you."
From that day on, Atlas made it a point to kiss her in greeting every time he saw her.
Weeks turned into months,and every evening Vesperin visited him beneath the willow tree.
The air grew cold and sharp, the nights long and weary. Fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit grew scarce as the ground was no longer ripe for sustenance, and the animals burrowed away.
She lived on thin herb soups and dried meat. She grew thinner.
Atlas grew worried.
One early dark night, bundled in a thick fur cloak, she trudged through snow to the meadow. The crater had long since filled with leaves, then grown packed with snow.
She kept shivering, and Atlas could take it no more. She was too frozen to protest as he led her away, down the slippery ice-coated hill and past the barren meadow.
He seemed torn, as though he would rather see her cold and clinging to him than safe and warm anywhere else. She wouldn’t go, even if he forced her away. She had grown reliant on him—the only being who had ever truly heard her, who had listened to everything she kept hidden. She told him things she never told anyone else.
"Where are we g-going?" she asked through frozen lips as his hand was tight and warm around hers, leading her stumbling through the snow.
He walked deep into the forest. Snow clung to the deadened tree limbs and blanketed the ground.
