Page 44 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

I looked out the window near the bed and watched the afternoon colors swallow Lumara, the light shifting slowly across the city as the day began to lean toward evening.

Crystal towers caught the sun and held it, sharp edges flashing as the angle changed. Traffic streamed along the sky lanes in steady, unbroken lines. Farther out, near the docks, cargo was being loaded piece by piece, crews moving with practiced efficiency.

It all carried on as it always did, as if nothing were about to change.

Later that night, our ship would roll out to the shuttle runway and lift clear of the city, leaving all of it beneath us.

I kept watching, trying to take it in while it was still right there in front of me.

“This would be pretty to draw.”

I leaned over and pulled my sketchbook out of my bag, flipping to a blank page. My hand started moving before I knew what I was drawing: the curve of the bunk frame, the little slice of city visible through the glass, and the faint reflection of my face with the translator chip blinking beneath my ear.

Around the edges, I added details I didn’t want to forget—the holographic stickers peeling at the corner of someone’s bunk curtain, the lava lamp in the common room, a pair of Zhari’s earrings abandoned on the tiny nightstand, and our two names glowing side by side on the door panel outside.

At the bottom, I wrote:

First day aboard.

Then, after a moment:

The first day that feels like mine.

The jump to D’yuti wasn’t bad at all. I was getting better at this—less anxious now that I was with Zhari. After the shows here, I always ended up on the loading deck with a Nebula Cosmo in one hand and whatever snacks Yuki had managed to pass around in the other. Zhari would find me eventually, once she’d changed out of her concert outfit and into something more comfortable. She’d drop onto the nearest crate, and I’d hand her a bottle of whatever was cold.

The first night, she sat close but didn’t touch me. The second night, her knee pressed against mine, and neither of us moved away. The nights that followed, she leaned her head on my shoulder while Lyn told a story about a show on Tessara where the gravity rig malfunctioned and the whole front row floated six feet off the ground.

That must have been what Pia’re had been talking about.

When the others eventually drifted off to their bunks, we’d stay out beneath the stars. She’d shift so she was facing me, her legs tucked beneath her, and we’d talk about nothing important in voices that grew quieter the later it got.

She’d play with the ends of my hair while I talked. I’d trace circles on her knee while she told me how she felt when she performed.

Once, she fell asleep mid-sentence, and I just sat there watching her breathe. Her glow had dimmed to almost nothing, her face completely soft, and I thought, This is the version of her nobody else gets.

I wanted to protect it so fiercely that it scared me.

The emotional intimacy was hard.

Knowing that we were meant for one another didn’t automatically make my feelings for her appear, despite my years of obsessing over her.

I was trying to get to know the real her, and I wanted her to get to know the real me.

Sometimes we didn’t even talk. We just sat together, exchanging looks that lasted too long and smiles that lingered for hours afterward. Her fingers found mine beneath a blanket during a late-night viewing-bubble session and stayed there.

I noticed her hands a lot, and it was becoming an issue. I thought I was developing some sort of fixation on this woman’s hands. I’d never even cared about hands before—not on anyone.

Zhari had long fingers, and she moved them when she talked. When she was running through a song, she’d tap rhythms on whatever surface was closest: her thigh, the table, the arm of the couch. I would watch her do it and forget what I was drawing.

She noticed me noticing. I could tell because her glow would flicker just a little at the edges of her cheekbones, and she’d look away first, pretending to be interested in something else.

Lyn noticed too.

Because Lyn noticed everything.

“You know you two are painful to watch, right?” she said one afternoon in the mess.

Both of us were eating Space Dogs while Yuki messed around with his phone.