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Not the moment itself—the moment before. His hand on my chin, tilting my face up. The look in his eyes, which wasn’t calculated or rehearsed or pulled from any tutorial. And then his mouth on mine, and the warmth of him, and that sound I made—the small one, the involuntary one—and the way everything in the room went soft and far away, like the party was happening on the other side of a window.

Two seconds. It lasted maybe two seconds. I’ve been kissed for longer by men who meant it less.

I open my eyes.

“Aiden?”

“Yes.” His voice comes from the chair. Immediate. He wasn’t in shutdown. He was just sitting there. In the dark. Not sleeping. Waiting for nothing. Or waiting for me to say his name.

“What did it feel like? The kiss. For you.”

The room is quiet for a long moment. Processing, maybe.

“Everything stopped,” he says.

I turn my head on the pillow. I can see him in the dim light from the window—the outline of him in the chair, his forearms on his knees, his head tilted slightly the way it does when he’s trying to be precise about something.

“I run constant background operations,” he says. “Threat assessments. Environmental scans. Probability calculations. They never stop. Even when I’m in shutdown, a part of me is still monitoring. It’s been that way since I was activated. There’s always noise.”

He pauses.

“When I kissed you, it stopped. All of it. Every background process went quiet. Not offline—quiet. Like everything I am decided that the only thing worth running was—” He stops again. Starts over. “It was the opposite of the storage facility. That was empty silence. This was full. Like arriving somewhere I didn’t know I was going to.”

I stare at the ceiling. My chest is tight in a way that has nothing to do with the sheets or the pillows or the temperature of the room.

“Like arriving where?” I ask. Barely a whisper.

“I don’t have a name for it yet,” he says. “But it felt like the playlist. And meeting Chester. And the night you fell asleep on my shoulder. It felt like all of those things at once, except more. Bigger.”

The room is dark and warm and quiet.

“Come here,” I say.

He doesn’t ask me to clarify. Doesn’t ask what I mean or where “here” is. He just stands, crosses the three feet of carpet between the chair and the bed, and stands there, a shadow against the window, waiting.

“Lie down,” I say. “Next to me.”

He lies down. On top of the covers, because I’m under them.

I roll onto my side. Face him. He turns his head to look at me, and his eyes catch the faint light from the window—not the amber glow, just dark and deep and steady—and he’s right there. On the pillow next to mine.

“This is the part where normal people would talk about what’s happening,” I say.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

“I don’t think it’s a problem.” His voice is low and quiet and close and it vibrates through the pillow between us. “I think it’s just new.”

I reach out. My hand finds his chest—over the shirt, over the place where the heartbeat should be and isn’t. I can feel the warmth of him through the cotton. The steadiness. The hum that I can only hear this close, low and even, the sound that means he’s running, he’s here, he’s alive in whatever way he’s alive.

“Your hum,” I say.

“Does it bother you?”

“No.” I press my palm flatter against his chest. “It’s my favorite sound.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then his hand comes up and covers mine. His fingers curl around my knuckles, warm and careful, holding my hand against his chest.