Maia straddled his hips, pinning the hardened length of him to her inner thigh. He groaned, pressing his lips to her mouth. Their tongues met, tangling and tasting each other hungrily as if they both knew this might be their last night together—both needing to write as much of these moments to memory as possible.
He trailed his hands down her back, memorizing every inch of skin as he went. He didn’t want to forget a single thing about her when he had nothing left but his memory to draw on if he wanted to be with her again in some small way.
He caressed her breasts and the tightened buds of her nipples. She gasped against his mouth and bit his lip.
“I need you,” she almost purred against his lips.
“I need you too, Maia. I think I might always need you.”
He reached under the edge of the blanket to where he’d stashed a condom from his wallet after he’d undressed. As he tore open the wrapper, she adjusted herself on top of him to allow him better maneuverability.
“You really are Mr. Confident tonight. Had this all planned out, did you? Stashed the condom while I wasn’t looking and everything.” She tsk’d at him with her tongue. “I should really teach you a lesson about being over-confident.”
He smirked. He loved her sense of humor. He loved bantering back and forth with her. Hell, if he wasn’t careful, he was going to plain old fall in love with her soon. “What kind of a gentleman would I be if I didn’t prepare for all emergencies?”
She laughed, her voice filling the small room. “Nice save.” She settled over him, as if waiting for him to make his move.
He pushed deep, one long thrust, seeking refuge for his desires inside her. She arched her body, letting her head fall back. Her long hair brushed against his hands as he squeezed her hips, guiding her movements.
His head spun with desire. This moment—Maia moving with him as if they were one soul connected over impossible boundaries—was all he ever wanted in life. This connection with someone, where everything felt so right that nothing outside of these four walls mattered, as long as he had her with him. He wanted her in his bed every night.
More than that, he wanted her in his life everyday.
They moved together, both breathing heavy as if they were running a marathon instead of being in each other’s arms—their kisses eager as if this could be their last. She cried out his name as her body clenched around him and he let himself tumble over the edge with her.
She collapsed onto his chest, her back rising and falling with quick breaths.
“Don’t go home,” he said as he stroked Maia’s back. He didn’t want her to roll off of him. He didn’t want to go home and leave him on Earth, broken and empty. He wanted to stay in this position, in this perfect moment forever. “Stay with me.”
“I can’t. You know that.” Her voice was muffled against his body, the heat of her breath penetrating him like it had a direct line to his heart.
“You can. We’ll run away. We’ll find somewhere remote to live where even Orion won’t be able to find you.” He knew he sounded desperate and bordering on pathetic, but he didn’t care. He needed Maia.
She rolled off of him and lay on her back beside him. “I knew this was a bad idea. I can’t stay. Orion won’t stop until he has me.”
“What if I go with you? Then maybe you can come back here. We can be together after all this other stuff is over.” He hoped she’d accept his offer. What would he do if she didn’t?
She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Nothing about our situation is simple.”
“I know that, but that doesn’t mean it has to end. I gave up a lot to be here with you today. I want to be able to be with you this way tomorrow.”
“So this is about sex?”
“Of course not. That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“Oh really? So what did you mean then?”
He rolled over and propped himself up on one elbow. “I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want us to be separated by a million stars. I’ll do whatever it takes for us to be together, even if that means I have to give up my life here to live with you on Pleiades.”
“You’d really do that? You’d really give up everything here to be with me?”
Why was that so hard to believe? Of course he would. He would do anything for her. “Yes. I’ve already screwed over my best friend by lying to him about you and I’d do it again in a heartbeat to protect you if you needed me to. I would do anything for you. Without you, I won’t have a life worth living here.”
Tears spilled from Maia’s eyes. What had he said that was so wrong?
“I’m sorry. Why are you crying?”
She sat up and pulled the blanket around herself. Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she was quiet for a few moments. “I want to say yes, Zander. I really do. But I can’t. The universe doesn’t work that way. You’ll go crazy if you come home with me. People from Earth aren’t supposed to live in the stars. You’re not cut out for life up there genetically, mentally. I can’t risk what it might do to you.”
He cupped her face with his hands, forcing her to really look at him. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take if the alternative is living the rest of my life without you because that’s not a life I’m willing to live.”
Why did she have to make this harder for him than it needed to be? He wanted to be with her. He would give up everything to go with her. That had to be enough, didn’t it?
Pressing his lips to her mouth, it was as if he’d finally found home. He’d finally found that discovery he’d always been striving to find. And now that he had, he didn’t care if no one else ever knew about it. Maia was so much more than a discovery to him. She was everything. She was real and tangible and beautiful—and she filled the void he hadn’t even known he’d been trying to fill.
She pulled back from him, breaking their kiss. Resting her forehead against his, she spoke with her eyes closed as if really contemplating her next words carefully. “Please don’t make this harder for me than it already is. You can’t come with me. I can’t stay here with you. This—whatever this is between us—is over.”
***
She sat cross-legged with the blanket wrapped tightly around her. It didn’t matter if Zander saw her naked again, she just wanted to stay warm. And she didn’t dare glance back at him to know if he was watching her sit there wrapped in her blanket. She could feel the anger and disappointment radiating off of him from here.
Maia could practically hear the cracks in his heart breaking apart from the words she’d forced herself to speak. It was deafening.
She knew it sucked. She knew he wanted to be with her. Of course, that was what she wanted too. Breaking it off with him now was hard, but it was better than going on with something that might really hurt him in the end. Change him in ways he could never come back from. She’d made her decision, knew what had to be done whether she liked it or not. Now she had to stick to it. No room to second-guess.
Pulling her bag into her lap, she unzipped it. As her quick inspection earlier had led her to believe, the things inside seemed to have remained dry. She pulled out one of her sparkly silver stilettos and admired the twinkling surface.
As she placed the shoe gently back inside the bag, a bright light suddenly surrounded her. A vibration of electricity pulsed in the air around her. Panic spiked inside her as she stared at Zander, who peered back at her with shock and concern in his eyes.
This couldn’t be happening.
She thought she’d been okay with her decision, but now that this was really happening, the fear inside made her second-guess everything.
Zander.
She’d never see him again. Certainly there was another way, there had to be. She needed more time to figure out what it was.
“No!” she cried. “No, I’m not ready yet.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tears sprang to Maia’s eyes as Zander and the bedroom disappeared. Blackness and distant twinkling stars swirled around her—a stark contrast to the bright light she’d seen only moments before.
Hugging her bag to her chest, she rocked back and forth, crying out for Zander, but he didn’t answer. He was gone. No, she was the one who was gone—zapped from the room as easily as if someone had blown out a candle.
But it wasn’t their choice to blow out that candle. It should have been her choice.
“Maia. Are you okay?” The sound of her father’s voice filled the space around her, warm and comforting like a hot bath.
Atlas knelt in front of her, obviously taking in her messy hair and the knit blanket wrapped tightly around her body. She must look a mess. The expression on his face was one of worry and confusion.
Good. He should be worried.
“Send me back. You had no right to take me yet. I wasn’t ready to go.” Her voice was surprisingly steady, despite the current of anger and betrayal boiling under her calm exterior.
“What do you mean send you back? Haven’t you been trying to get home? Isn’t that why you called out for help?”
“What are you talking about, Dad? I couldn’t call you, remember? The intergalactic operators were mysteriously unavailable for the first time in—ever.” She practically spit the last word at him. If she could have shot daggers out of her mouth, she would have.
“I’m sorry. I did what I thought was best. I know you couldn’t get through to us up here, but I also knew it meant Orion would have trouble getting through to any of his contacts on Earth too. I thought it would help protect you. But after your call to me earlier, I guess I was wrong.”
Maia tried to shake the confusion clouding her brain. “What call? I couldn’t get through. Then Orion found us—me, and I’ve been on the run ever since.”
“I heard you ask me for help. You said you didn’t know what to do.”
At the statue of Atlas, across from the church, she had talked to him as if he were there since that statue was about as close to her father as she thought she would get for a while. She had no idea it would actually get through to him.
Atlas looked off into the distance as if lost in his own thoughts. “Perhaps in hindsight, I should have consulted you girls before taking an action so drastic.”
“You think?” She wasn’t above sarcasm.
“Your sister has already been up one side of me and down the other.” He shook his head and chuckled to himself. “I don’t know why I ever thought you girls couldn’t handle yourselves. You’re all much feistier than I give you credit for.”
“You bet I’m feistier,” Maia said, climbing to her feet. “Now send me back this instant. I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
“Goodbye to who?”
“No one. Never mind. Just send me back.”
“I can’t do that. It isn’t safe to go back there if Orion had already found you. What happened down there that you’re not telling me?” Her father’s voice rattled with a hint of authority in it, as if he could still boss her around as an adult.
“I met someone. He helped me escape from Orion. I didn’t want to leave things with him the way I did when you zapped me back here.”
Atlas put his strong, reassuring hands on Maia’s shoulders. His concern for her was etched in every line of his face. “Did you have feelings for this boy? I thought you were stronger than that. I thought you knew how this worked for us. I thought it was safe to send you there and then you go and find some boy and develop feelings for him?”
“I’m not a child, and he’s not a boy. He’s a man and I’m a woman and I can’t help it if I have feelings for him anymore than I can help it that I live here and he lives there. But it doesn’t matter anymore does it? You zapped me up here, right out of that room, and the only way I’ll ever see him again is if I go back to Earth.”
Maia squared her shoulders and took a step back from her father. That’s exactly what she was going to do—go right back to Earth. Right back to New York to find Zander. And if she had to spend the rest of her eternity on Earth so she could be with him, then that was fine with her. She would happily give up her life here if it meant being with him.
“I’m going back.”
“Maia, honey. I know you think you can find a way to live down there permanently, but you can’t. It’s too hard for us.”
“Yes I can. I saw all kinds of people down there just like us, living among the mortals. I can be one of them.”
“Did any of them look happy?”
She thought back to the people she’d spotted on this or other visits to Earth. Were they happy? She thought back to her visit to Café Cosmos on her first visit to Earth with her friends, back when it had still been open. The people there had all been alone or sitting beside people at the bar, all of them hunched over their drinks not speaking. Maybe they hadn’t been as happy as she thought.
“They try to make it in the normal world with mortals and then when the inevitable time comes and the mortal dies, they can’t bare to leave the planet and come back home. They waste away down there as time passes. We’re different. We’re not meant to live on that planet.”
“Maybe it won’t be the same for me.”
“Or maybe it will be the same and you won’t recover from it. Stay here. Find someone here to love. Be happy for your eternity.”
“I’m not sure I can be happy without him.”