Page 5 of Thexan

His warning should have made me move away.

For one heartbeat, I almost did.

Every sensible instinct I had told me to put distance between us, to listen when a wounded alien warrior looked me in the eyes and told me I was in danger. But my hand was still against his chest, and beneath my palm, his breathing had changed. The tension that had been locking his body in place had eased. His pulse no longer felt like it was trying to tear through him.

Whatever was happening, my touch was helping.

And he hadn’t warned me like a man making a threat.

He had warned me like a man fighting himself.

So I stayed.

I kept my hand against the center of his chest, feeling the strange, structured heat of him beneath my palm while I watched his face for any change that might tell me whether I had made the wrong decision. There were ridges along his brow and cheekbones, subtle but unmistakable, catching the infirmary light in a way no human bone structure ever would. His skin was not skin the way mine was. Up close, it had a scaled texture, smooth in some places, faintly plated in others, with a density beneath it that made my hand feel too human, too soft, too breakable by comparison.

And yet he was the one lying on my cot, bleeding through a bandage I had already changed twice.

“You said I was in danger from you,” I said, keeping my voice even because his body had gone dangerously still beneath my touch. “Are you warning me because you intend to hurt me, or because you’re afraid you might?”

His eyes remained on mine. They were not human either. I had known that before, but awareness and direct confrontation were two different things. In the dim light they looked almost golden, though that didn’t fully describe them. There was too much depth, too much contained intensity, as if some inner heat still burned behind the exhaustion and pain.

“I do not intend harm,” he said.

The words came rough, shaped with effort, but his meaning was clear enough.

“Then we’ll start there.”

His chest moved under my palm as he drew in a slow breath. I felt the movement before I heard it, the controlled expansion of a body built with more strength than anything I had treated before. The tremor that followed was slight, almost hidden, but I caught it anyway because I had been watching him too closely not to.

“You should remove your hand.”

“I probably should,” I agreed.

I didn’t.

His fingers loosened from my wrist by slow degrees, not because he wanted to let go, but because he had decided to. The release should have made the contact between us less intense.

It didn’t.

If anything, my palm against his chest felt more deliberate now that he was no longer holding me there.

The corner of his mouth tightened, not quite in pain and not quite in impatience. “Human female—”

“Brynn,” I interrupted.

He stared at me as if I had given him something he did not know what to do with.

“My name is Brynn Ellison. If you’re going to keep warning me that I’m in danger while lying half-conscious in my infirmary, you can at least use my name.”

I thought he might refuse. Instead, his attention fixed more sharply on me.

“Thexan.”

The sound of it moved through the room differently than a human name would have. Low. Precise. Foreign enough that I knew I would remember it.

“Thexan,” I repeated, testing the shape of it carefully.

Something changed in him when I said it. Not visibly, not enough that anyone else might have noticed, but I was close enough to feel the response beneath my hand. His breathing deepened by a fraction, and the hard tension through his chest eased before he seemed to realize it had happened.