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“Like a guest,” he corrects her, as the hope her initial response sparked in him sputters and fades.

“An unwilling guest, yes. So very different from a prisoner.”

It takes him a long interval to parse her tone, a mere fraction of one of her seconds. “You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t have sarcasm where you come from, do you?”

Such feints and games of meaning make little sense from the colony’s perspective. He’s almost forgotten what it’s like, interacting as an individual with another discrete organism, her inner processes unknowable to him. “I am, you might say, long out of practice.”

The fluidity in her emotional affect has him straining to adapt. Her expression changes again, and she steps toward him, stopping at the bottom of the wide, shallow steps. She’s hungry, still, but hiding it, examining him as if running her own analysis. “Wheredoyou come from, anyway? Are you alone in this place? Or are there…” She swallows. “Others, here. Like you.”

How to answer such questions? “Come,” he says, instead. “Sit. Eat. And then if you like…perhaps I can show you.”

Hecanshow her where he came from, even if it’s not what she meant. He is alone, but not, and there are others, like him and not. He can embody any preference, give her almost anything she wants, except an explanation that will make sense to a member of a species with binary definitions ofaloneandtogether.

There are so many of him. There is only onehim.

And now, her. Singular. Alone, with me. Together…

He extends a hand, inviting her to move closer, to join. For another long moment, she stares at his hand, then at him. Some Earthly threat assessment runs in the background of her gaze before she finally seems to come to a decision.

Her movements deliberate, almost challenging, she takes his hand and lets him lead her to the table, but frowns again when she takes in the foodstuffs spread there. “That can’t be—mac and cheese? If we’re so far from Earth, then where…Did youmakeall this?”

“I wasn’t sure what you liked,” he says. “You seemed partial to a prepackaged form, but I prepared a variety of other dishes popular in your home region.”

She’s already plunked herself down in a chair. For a moment he stands still and closes his eyes, feeling what it’s like to hold her, the warm weight of her thighs pressing into this other part of him. In the cleft between her legs, her heat pulses like a beacon, satin fabric clinging to the slick folds at her core.

With a shudder, he drags his awareness back from the whole to focus on this interaction. Oblivious to his lapse, she heaps food on her plate: the ground-wheat paste, shaped and boiled, that she callsmacaroni, hot and dripping with molten, creamy cheese and topped with tidbits of cured meat; starchy tubers cut into straws, fried to a light crisp and salted well; greens and protein in a spiced sauce over soft, steamed whole grains.

She tries a bite of each, tentative at first with wide eyes, then with a soft sound in her throat that calls his every cell to attention. Her pleasure, his prerogative, a pull as steady as a magnet.

“This isamazing,” she says, and then opens her eyes to frown at him. “I suppose I should thank you for not eating me instead.”

“I told you,” he says, stung. “That’s not why I brought you here.” Then he swallows, hard, as the still, breathless part of him now cupping the curves of her seated body whispers,not to eat, no. But to taste…

“Right. That’s the part you haven’t explained.” She pops another forkful of food into her mouth, savoring it this time, and he tries not to fixate on the way her lips wrap around the implement and pull it into the hot, wet depths of her mouth. “Whydidyou bring me here, Cassiel? Seems like a lot of trouble to go through, just to ask a girl to a fancy dinner date.”

He almost laughs because of hownot wrongshe is, but he knows he must take special care with this. He doesn’t want to make her cry again. The next time he tastes her, he wants to know her joy, not her despair.

“You called out,” he says, cautiously. “We came. And then—perhaps we, or I, acted too quickly. You were so beautiful, you see.”

Her fork pauses halfway to her lips. “What are you talking about?”

“Perhaps you didn’t mean to, but I heard you. All the way across the system, out here in the black—it had been a long time since…We had little choice. I had to follow it. I had to know whose call it was.”

“I don’t know whatcallyou’re talking about.”

There’s no way around it. He must tell her, sooner or later. “It sang to me like a…symphony,” he tells her, soft with the memory of it. “Or perhaps your myths would liken it to a siren’s spell.”

“You’re saying Ienchantedyou.” She sounds skeptical, suspicious even, but her eyes are locked on his, as if some part of her can already read between the lines. “How?”

“Your pleasure. Your desire. You must understand,” he hastens, at her deepening frown. “I didn’t know, exactly…To our kind, such a call, ecstasy spooled out across the stars, we hear it in a different way?—”

Her fork clatters to the table. “This call. Please tell me it’s not?—”

“I can’t.” He circles toward her around the table in case she tries to run again. “It woke me from a long sleep and pulled me toward you. I didn’t know you, but I knew what you were.My mate.”

“A mating call.” She leaps to her feet. “Fuck me.”