His relief was a beautiful thing. Needing to study his reactions to know what he was thinking was a beautiful thing. All the wonder and excitement and disorientation she’d felt when she’d met him for the first time returned in a flood, and she stepped away from the railing and closed her eyes.

She heard him land next to her on the balcony and something flooded her, a strange warmth. A rightness. Curiosity. It was the curiosity that was the most exciting thing, the thing she didn’t remember ever experiencing.

How had she never thought about how much she missed not knowing? How wondrous it was to meet someone new and to get to process them as a clean slate? From a place of utter and beautiful ignorance.

All she’d done her whole life was push away information about people as it bombarded her. The act of deciphering people was the heart of being human, but she’d never experienced it. Not in as long as she could remember.

“Esha?” he said again. He was next to her now. “You okay, sweetheart?”

“You called me sweetheart.” She didn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t. She wanted to gauge everything from his voice, his words, how they fell on her. She wanted to narrow down the points of intersection between them, feel every strand of connection as a separate thing.

“I’m sorry. It was a reflex. I’ll be careful if you don’t like it.”

“I like it. I like it very much.” She wanted him to call her sweetheart again. “Sid?”

“Yes?” If he thought it was strange that she had her eyes closed, his voice didn’t show it.

“Will you tell me something about yourself?”

Okay. She opened her eyes and caught the word in his. It was an indescribably wonderful feeling to catch unsaid words in his eyes. Now that she had opened her own, she wanted to go on looking at him.

For the longest time, she did. And he looked at her in return. Just watched her as she watched him, the afternoon sun haloing around them.

She wanted to touch him again. Touch him and feel nothing. Well, she’d felt things, but those things were inside herself. Not inside him. She wanted to feel those again. Just those.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Tell me something no one else knows about you.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets without moving his gaze from hers. “You first. Tell me something no one knows about you.”

That made Esha want to laugh, and cry. Everyone who knew her, a sum total of fifteen people, was always too afraid to ask her about herself.

“You,” she whispered, studying his eyes for those precious reactions, trying not to be distracted by the beautiful lines that radiated out from their edges in a perfect fan.

She could tell he’d misunderstood what she meant.