He didn’t stop walking but he stiffened the slightest bit. It had become her favorite thing, studying his reactions, decoding the language of his body—gestures, expressions, modulations, all of it speaking to her, meaning something. A something that drew from an entire vocabulary of meanings, and she couldn’t stop deciphering and deciphering him.

“This.” She stopped and waved a hand around her. She’d never been a gesticulator, needing to keep her actions contained to keep everything from unraveling her. The action felt much less alien than it had felt at first. “The fact that you come to see me.” The fact that he had climbed her balcony because he’d seen Garuda rolled over inside her. “Is this”—us—“only about finding a bird?”

Had she been an idiot? Had she trusted him, actually allowed herself to unravel because he was obsessed with his flora and fauna?

She started walking again, but it wasn’t a walk, it was a run. It jolted her body, always used to care, with a strange live beat.

Reaching for her arm again, he stopped her. “Should you run?”

He thought she was sick. She was, though. She was sick. She’d been her whole life.

“Esha, if you say some of those things that are churning inside you, it might help you.” His dark, brooding eyes were like a lake, bottomless with understanding. The kind of understanding he exhibited about every creature on earth.

“Is that a characteristic of the Homo sapiens?”

What? He didn’t say the word. It was his eyes that did. He just waited. A scientist. A photographer. A renderer of nature.

“What have you found out about me? You’ve been studying me for a couple months. What am I?”

A blast of pain went through the onyx depths of his eyes. There was always a staidness to him, a quietness, but this was an explosion if she’d ever seen one. Violent.

His body pulled toward her, pulled away from her. Exactly mirroring what she’d been feeling. Maybe she should never have said what she’d said. Maybe this was not how adult humans communicated, verbalizing every thought that popped into their head.

An apology came to her lips, but she stuck out her jaw, something stopping her from spilling it only because she didn’t want him to leave. He was going to leave anyway. She could see it in his eyes.

Then he blinked, as though he’d had a sudden realization. “Esha.” A breath. Every word that ever left him was deliberate. He didn’t have this human-communication thing down pat either. “You’re like no one I’ve ever met.”

How could she not laugh at that? Laughter spilled from her, a geyser erupting in harsh spurts.

That made him step closer, made him cup her jaw. When he touched her he always did it without hesitance. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”