It started at her hairline and crept down her spine like fingers trailing down her back, turning her hands clammy and her stomach to ice water, and her thoughts to a single bright, sharp point ofno.
"Hello, Phoebe. I heard you're coming home." His voice was gentle. He set his bag down by the door as if he were settling in. "I've been making arrangements for us."
Phoebe pushed past the racing pulse in her throat that threatened to steal her voice and forced herself to remain as casual as possible while she said, “Hello, Mr. Hale. It’s nice to see you.”
His smile broadened with delight.
“Gavin, please. We’re too close for the formality of last names. Besides, now that you’re going home, we can finally start building our relationship together.”
“Oh? I’d… I’d like that.” She pushed the words out and hoped he didn’t notice the waver in her voice as he stepped closer.
“I thought you would. I have passage booked for both of us. I’ve been thinking about you since the first time I saw you sing back on Earth. Ever since the festival began, I knew no one else would ever understand you like I do. And now that you’re returning home, we can start fresh. Earth is big enough for both of us, and we’ll be away from that security officer who’d kept us apart. He never understood what you really needed.” His hand raised to push back a piece of hair behind her ear, and Phoebe held still while her whole body wanted to flinch away. “But I do. I know what you need, Phoebe. I’m your truest listener.”
“That’s right, you are.” Her mind was racing with what to do.Will he get violent if I don’t do what he asks? Just play along until you can get help.
Help.
She still had Thorne’s emergency comm unit, though she hadn’t thought about it in days.
“It looks like you’re ready to go,” she said, nodding at his duffel bag. “I’ll just get my coat.”
She stepped toward the coat rack.
“Here, let me,” the journalist said, pulling her bright red wool coat from the hanger. He held it open for her and waited for her to place her arms in.
She took a deep breath and turned her back to him, placing her arms through the holes. He pulled the coat up and over her shoulders, tugging it snugly around her and then brushing his hands down her arms.
“Finally together,” he said, helping her pull her hair free from the coat’s collar.
Phoebe repressed a shudder and took a step away from his embrace. She fixed a smile on her face before she turned around.
“We can send for your belongings to be delivered later. A star like you shouldn’t have to do her own packing.”
“Of course. You’re… you’re right.”
Phoebe's hand found the security comm in her coat pocket. The weight of it against her fingers helped ground her and gave her courage she sorely needed.
She pressed the button.
nineteen
. . .
Thorne’s apartment was dark.
Frost covered everything. The windowsill, the kitchen counter, and the surface of the desk where the GTC files sat in their neat stack beside a drawer he kept opening and closing like pressing on a bruise. The Eternal Pine's bioluminescence pulsed through the wide window in slow green-gold waves, casting shifting patterns across the ice on the glass, and the distant sound of the festival's last evening events carried up from the market lane. Music. Laughter. The creak of vendor stalls and the bright thread of a carol sung in a language he didn't recognize. A world still turning.
His had stopped.
Thorne sat on the couch with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging between them, and his wool blanket folded wrong on the reading chair across from him, exactly where she'd left it. She'd folded it horizontally instead of vertically. He had noticed it the last time she’d spent the night in his home, and he hadn't corrected it. Moving it meant admitting she was gone from these rooms the way she was gone from his arms and his bed and the mornings that smelled like her, and he was notready to admit that, so the blanket sat there with its wrong folds and the apartment sat around him with its frost.
Two voices had been circling him for days.
Selene’s voice had been running on repeat in his brain.Staying would have caged me and meant becoming someone smaller than I wanted to be.But tonight, Kaelor’s voice was the one that wouldn’t leave.Have you given her a real choice, or have you made the choice for her and called it kindness?
He had told her to take the contract, rebuilt the distance between them, and he had done it all on his own. The same way Selene had made her decision and called it survival. It was the same pattern. The same fear dressed in different clothes.
He’d allowed the fear to choose for the one person who saw everything. Who kissed him in his own doorway with morning light on her face. Who moved above him with her hands on his chest and chose him, actively and visibly, and he had looked at that choosing and decided it wasn't enough to survive geography, and he had never once asked her what she thought.
