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She stopped abruptly, and he stopped too. They looked at each other across the edge of the pool, and the water between them was trembling. Small, perfect rings were spreading across the surface, one inside the other. They rippled out from the place where he stood to the place where she was crouched.

She looked down at the rings, and then back up at him, and her cheeks turned pink.

“Sorry,” she said. “I sing when I’m concentrating. It’s a terrible habit. My mother used to say I could clear a room with it.”

He didn’t care about her mother, or rooms, or whatever made it a terrible habit. He only knew that she had stopped, and that the silence afterwards was worse than any silence he had ever known.

“Do not stop,” he said, and his voice came out low and rough.

She stared at him wordlessly. Then, slowly and a little shyly, she started to hum again.

He answered her, and this time he didn’t hold back. He let the song rise up and meet hers, the deep notes under her light ones. The water rippled and shivered between them and the rock thrummed beneath their feet. Her song was wrong and wandering, and it didn’t matter at all. His song found the places where it faltered and carried it. He didn’t know what he was singing. He only knew that it was an answer, and that he had been waiting for this for longer than he could remember.

He had crossed the pool without meaning to. He was standing in front of her, close enough to feel the warmth of her body. She had stopped humming and was looking up at him with her eyes dark and wide.

He bent his head and touched his forehead to hers. It was what his people did. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did. Brow against brow, breath against breath, until they breathed the same air. Her breath was warm on his lips. It smelled sweetly of the dark fruit and of her. He breathed it in and felt her breathe him in too, and her whole body shivered.

Then she tilted her head and touched her mouth to his. It was only a brush of her lips at first, light and soft and questioning. For a moment he didn’t understand. She drew back just far enough to look at him, and there was a tiny, uncertain smile on her face. Then she did it again, slower this time, and her lips moved against his, and her hand came up to rest against his jaw.

He understood all at once, and he caught her face in his hands and answered her.

He knew he was clumsy at first, because she laughed softly against his mouth. But she didn’t pull away. She showed him, moving her lips over his, slow and patient and then not patient at all, and he learned. He learned how to fit his mouth to hers. He learned how to take her lower lip gently between his teeth, and how it made her gasp when he did. He learned how she tasted, sweet and warm, and how she sounded when he drew her closer. He learned that when he slid his arm around her waist and pulled her against him, she melted into him. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed her mouth harder against his.

He didn’t want to stop, not ever. The heat was roaring through him and his scales burned, and the low rumble started deep in his chest, and he couldn’t have stopped it if he tried. She was soft and warm and fierce in his arms, and her mouth moved on his as if she were starving for him too.

Mine, he thought, and the word was so loud inside him that he was afraid she would hear it.

She broke away first. She pulled back just far enough to drag in a deep, shuddering breath, then another. Her hands were clutching his shoulders and her forehead was resting against his chest.

“Air,” she gasped. “Sorry. Humans need air.”

He held her while she breathed, his heart thundering, the taste of her still on his lips. When she finally lifted her head, her cheeks were flushed and her lips were red and swollen. Her eyes were bright and a little stunned.

“Where did you learn that?” she asked breathlessly.

He looked down at her flushed face and her tangled hair and her mouth that was still so temptingly close to his. He smiled.

“Now,” he said. “From you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Frankie woke up breathing, and it took her a few seconds to understand why that felt so strange. She was lying on a bed of soft, springy moss beside one of the warm pools, wrapped in her thermal blanket. The glow of the gardens shimmered green and blue on the high walls. Her mask was sitting on the rock beside her head, where she had put it the night before. And she was breathing, slowly and deeply, the way she hadn’t been able to breathe since the ledge had crumbled away beneath her feet.

The air smelled of water and leaves and the sweet dark fruit. She lay there for a long time and simply breathed it.

Then she remembered the kiss, and heat flooded her from head to toe.

God, she had kissed him. She had kissed an enormous scaled male with a tail, at the bottom of a river on Mars, and she had liked it. She had more than liked it. She had wrapped herself around him like a vine and kissed him until she couldn’t breathe. If her lungs hadn’t given out, she wasn’t entirely sure she would have stopped. She pulled the blanket over her face and groaned.

Neither of them had said anything about it afterwards. Korrak had looked down at her with that slow smile and said, “From you,” and her knees had gone so weak that she had needed to sit down abruptly. Then he had gone off to pick more fruit, and she had sat on the rock with her fingers pressed to her lips until the moment passed. They had eaten, and she had made notes on her tablet until her eyes blurred. At some point she had curled up on the moss and fallen asleep.

He had been sitting a little distance away watching the water when she closed her eyes, but he wasn’t there now. She lowered the blanket and sat up. There he was, crouched at the edge of the pool a few meters away with his tail curled around his feet, watching her.

“Good morning,” she said, and her voice came out embarrassingly husky.

He tilted his head curiously. “Good… mor-ning?”

“It’s what we say when we wake up.” She waved vaguely at the ceiling. “When it gets light. Well. Lighter.”