Page 45 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I scoffed.

“You literally just drew her hands for forty minutes,” Lyn said, gesturing at my sketchbook with a chopstick. “I counted. You drew seven different versions of her left hand. That is not the behavior of someone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m an artist,” I said. “Hands are hard. Everyone draws hands a lot.”

I started to fidget with my pencil.

“You drew her hands,” Lyn said. “Her specific hands. With the ring she wears on her index finger. And the scar on her thumb from that lighting-rig accident two tours ago.”

She puckered her lips, playfully mocking me.

“That is not a hand study, Vada. That is a love letter.”

“It’s a sketch.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s it.”

“It looks a lot like you’re falling in love with her,” she said with a grin.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I was falling in love with her subconsciously, and my brain was the only part of me that wasn’t up to speed.

“She said she’d be patient with me,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like we haven’t, you know…”

I raised my eyebrows and smirked.

“We just haven’t fully bonded. This is huge for a human. I didn’t know this was a thing across species.”

“Yeah,” Lyn said. “She is. And you are sitting here drawing her hands like a woman possessed. So maybe the question isn’t whether she’s patient enough. Maybe the question is why you’re still making her wait when you clearly don’t want to.”

“But if your aura locks onto someone else’s,” I muttered, my eyes on my sketchbook, “do you actually feel something for them? Or is it more like… ‘Well, I guess this is who I’m bound to now’? Because I don’t want to be someone’s obligation. I want her to want me. Me—not just… whatever the bond says I am.”

I tapped my pencil against the page.

“I think this is what I’ve been struggling with. It’s also such a short period of time.”

“Velans move fast. It’s just in their nature. While I'm not a Velan, my species also has aura bonding but, I’ve never had a bond, obviously,” Lyn said, waving her chopsticks for emphasis. “But my parents did. And this is what they told me.”

She leaned forward, her voice dropping slightly.

“Once they saw that aura connection, everything else fell away. Their whole world narrowed to each other. That was it. That was the axis. Their hearts beat, and they felt it answer in their own chests.”

She tapped the table lightly.

“My mother said it felt like something deep and old waking up in her bones—like she had always been carrying this love around, and the bond just gave it a name.”

She paused, then continued.

“It wasn’t about having to choose him. It was that there was no choice that made sense anymore except him. And in that connection, they didn’t just see an aura. They saw every version of each other—what they’d been through, what they were afraid of, what they wanted.”

She shrugged.

“They loved each other with all of that in the picture. So from the outside, it might have looked like she was just following a bond. But from the inside?”

Lyn shrugged again.

“It was a lot more than that.”

Lyn described it so beautifully. Why was I wasting so much time overthinking?

My logic was simple. I knew that if I bonded to her, it wouldn’t just be a crush, a tour fling, or something I could laugh off later. It would be a line I couldn’t uncross.