Page 74 of Thexan

The silence stretched between us again, but this time it didn’t feel uncertain.

“If the bond were not present,” he said, and this time the pause that followed wasn’t uncertainty so much as adjustment, as though he were aligning his answer with something he had not needed to articulate before, “I would still choose to remain.”

The words settled into me differently than anything he had said before. They didn’t carry heat or urgency, and he didn’t offer them as reassurance. He stated them the same way he stated everything else—controlled, precise, without excess.

But they held.

“Because of me?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Not because it’s efficient.”

“No.”

“Not because it improves your survival odds.”

“No.”

I watched him for a moment longer, letting the weight of that sit where it belonged instead of trying to pick it apart.

“Good,” I said quietly. “Because I’m choosing to be with you, too.”

Something shifted then.

Not in the bond—I had already learned the difference—but in him.

It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t move immediately, didn’t close the distance, or reach for me the way someone else might have. Instead, he held my gaze a fraction longer than before, as though confirming something internally before acting on it.

Then he stepped forward.

The movement was controlled, but not restrained, and when his hand came up to mine, the contact wasn’t exploratory the way it had been before. It was deliberate. Certain.

Acknowledging.

“This time,” I said softly, aware of how close we were now, aware of the way the space between us no longer felt like something that needed to be protected, “we mate because we want to.”

“Yes,” he said.

There was no hesitation in it.

No qualification.

Just agreement.

His hand shifted slightly, not pulling me toward him, but guiding, and I moved with it without thinking, closing the last of the distance between us. The bond responded, not with urgency, but with a steady awareness that settled deeper instead of sharper, as though it recognized the difference as clearly as I did.

“This is the infirmary,” I said, glancing briefly toward the main space before meeting his gaze again. “We will not do this here.”

“Clarify.”

I let out a quiet breath, something almost like a smile slipping through despite everything.

“There’s a back room,” I said. “Where I actually live.”

His gaze shifted briefly toward the side wall, toward the recovery room where he had spent the past days healing on a cot that was too short for him no matter how many blankets I added to it.

“That is not the room where I have rested,” he said.