Page 52 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

I turned toward her and brushed a quick kiss to the tip of her nose. Then I slid my fingers into her hair, following it down to the back of her neck. A gentle tug brought her closer until our mouths met in a slow, sleepy kiss.

“You are glowing,” she murmured against my lips.

“You mean you’re glowing. I don’t glow. I’m human,” I said as I traced circles along her back.

“You are glowing on the inside,” she explained. “I can see it in your aura. It’s doing something new today.”

She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at me.

“It’s, like, swirling purple and pink. But there’s also a faint blue glow around the edges. It looks beautiful.”

“It sounds beautiful,” I said.

“It is,” she said, grinning before her smile faded and she let out a long sigh. “I wish we could stay in moments like these forever. My favorite kinds of days are the slow and peaceful ones. I rarely get them.”

“Me too.”

I pulled her down and kissed her—playful and teasing, our tongues swirling together in a flirty little dance. She slipped her hands beneath the blanket, found my hip, and gave it a cheeky squeeze.

When I pulled back, she grinned and rolled on top of me in one smooth motion, straddling my hips with a playful wiggle.

She looked down at me, her hands sliding up my waist and her fingers squeezing lightly.

“We should do something… fun.” Her brows did a quick little wiggle, a smirk tugging at one corner of her mouth.

“We did something fun last night,” I said. “But I could definitely do that fun again.”

I smirked.

“Something outside,” she said, her glow flickering on her neck. “I want to show you Orin. You have only seen it while going to and from both concerts. You haven’t actually been to Orin. It’s one of my favorite places besides Vela.”

Zhari booped my nose and rolled off me, sprawling out beside me.

We’d been there for a few days by then, and I’d barely seen any of it beyond the concert venue and the loading dock. The concerts were at night, so there wasn’t much to see in the dark. Once we got to the city, it was rush, rush underground and then up to the venue.

The shows there had been incredible. The crowds were smaller than at the Lumara concert, but they were louder and more intense. Zhari fed off it. She was different there—looser onstage and more playful.

She’d improvised an entire new bridge on the second night, and Lyn had just gone with it, grinning behind the drums while the crowd lost their minds.

Orin itself was still a mystery to me beyond what I could see from the viewport. I would look out the window in our room, where I could see the landscape stretching beyond the city limits.

The rolling hills were covered in something that wasn’t quite grass. It was more like low, silvery ferns that caught the light and threw it back in shifting patterns.

The sky there was also different from Vela’s. It was paler, almost pearlescent, with two small suns that hung low on the horizon and never seemed to fully set. Everything had a soft, permanent golden-hour quality that made me want to sit outside with my sketchbook for about six hours straight.

And don’t get me started on the flora.

The flora was wild.

Even from the bus window, I’d spotted things I had no names for—trees with pale trunks that you could almost see through if the light hit them right, their sap moving inside like thick honey. Clusters of something that looked like coral grew out of the hillsides, bright orange and teal, swaying even when there was no wind.

Flowers, if you could call them that, seemed to open and close in slow pulses, their petals curling and unfurling in rhythm with one another as if they were breathing together. They were spectacular.

A few small creatures moved in groups across the fields. They ran low to the ground, their bodies shifting color to match whatever surface they crossed. They looked almost like a mix between squirrels and foxes.

Very strange-looking things, but cute.

I had also seen something that looked like a bird, except it had four wings and moved through the air in spirals instead of straight lines. Yuki told me the local animals were mostly harmless, except for something called a Ridgeback, which was apparently the size of a dog with the temperament of a wasp.