Chapter Text
*
Of our six years of travel, arriving on Erid went surprisingly smooth.
Communication with Erid had grown steadily easier during the last two years of the journey. There were countless landing calculations, pressure checks, atmospheric readings ...all crowding our screens as soon as the first signal went through the Hail Mary’s receiving frequency.
We divided the work fairly. I was busy fighting my severe sleep deprivation, while Rocky handled the engineers, scientists, medical specialists, government officials, family members, and what appeared to be an entire committee devoted to keeping one soft alien from cooking, freezing, suffocating, collapsing under gravity, poisoning himself on the walls, or developing a fatal reaction to local furniture. It was reassuringly disturbing that most of the questions concerned * me*. I never received that kind of attention back on Earth. And we were talking about alien cutting-edge science here! As you can imagine, my curiosity was off the charts.
They talked in Eridian so fast that I hadn't got a chance to wedge a single word in. During the final approach, somebody from the surface got onto the frequency and requested my latest metabolic data for the last time.
It was a list of questions about my circulation, bone density, and "acceptable tactile compression."
“Acceptable tactile compression,” I read aloud, rubbing both hands down my arms. My skin felt hot. Or cold. It had become difficult to tell. “Rocky, are your scientists asking how hard they’re allowed to squeeze me?”
Rocky stopped mid argument and leaned over the console, two hands moving rapidly across the controls while a third adjusted the incoming signal. His legs tapped a bright, impatient rhythm against the deck.
“Scientists ask maximum safe pressure for contact suit,” he said, tilting his carapace. “Grace previously answers.”
A contact suit!? So those Eridian scientists and engineers really were the best in the universe.
“I answered a lot of things!” I blinked at the display, trying not to sound too excited. The text doubled, merged, and became text again. “At some point yesterday I may have agreed to be compressed into a convenient travel cube.”
“Grace does not need to worry. Eridians cherish Grace.” A pleased chord vibrated through him. Rocky had been making those all day.
Eridians liked me. I couldn't help the silly smile that spread across my face. I liked them too.
Rocky went back to the call before I could get more details about the suit, so I shrugged and listened, trying to rely on my broken Eridian. I was so excited, but their negotiations seemed endless and unusually tedious. Unfortunately, I stopped following their argument around minute twelve. By minute twenty, I became convinced the exact same Eridian sentence had been repeated seven times. I briefly wondered whether I had fallen asleep standing up and was now dreaming up a first contact.
A contact suit! I called it the touch suit when nobody official was listening. I had spent six years imagining Erid; for the last two, I had also imagined touching it. Touching the ground. Touching an Eridian-built wall. Touching a machine made by people who had evolved beneath another sun. Touching Rocky, without several layers of improvised insulation between us.
The engines dropped in pitch. One warning indicator disappeared, then another. My thoughts dissolved as the ship settled onto the landing platform with a long metallic growl.
The vibration from the impact traveled up through the deck and into my feet as if the planet's gravity were tearing the ship apart, and I had to hold on to the console to prevent myself from getting knocked over by the force. After years of deceleration coming from the nose of the ship, the sudden acceleration from another direction made it feel like the room was tilting wildly around me. The metallic groan grew louder, reminding me that neither the Hail Mary nor I was made for Erid. My knees went weak. Outside, the world remained mostly hidden behind the hull.
While I was struggling to stand, Rocky remained perfectly at ease beside the controls, all five of his legs pressed firmly into the floor.
"We arrive," he said. His voice contained so much harmony that my transition software briefly gave up and displayed several overlapping emotional tags. Happiness. Relief. Home.
"I gathered that," I said dryly.
Rocky rotated toward me, his movements growing faster by the hour. He was coming to life the closer we got to his home planet, filled with little bursts of energy he kept trying to suppress. "Contact suit prepared, scientists brought to landing platform. I retrieve for Grace."
He was getting much better with human pronouns lately. I looked at the airlock, then back at him. “You're going outside?"
"Yes, Grace," he answered matter-of-factly, rolling across the ship impatiently. "I return quickly."
If Rocky were human, he would be sprinting home. I was excited too, though for a different reason. I had seen pictures and scans through the feed sent from the ground. I had watched recordings made by Eridian instruments and translated into a spectrum my nervous system could process. But mone of that counted.
Pictures and recordings were just data. This was a new planet beneath my feet. My hands would not stop shaking, so I hid them under my arms before realizing Rocky could feel every vibration I made through the air. You couldn't fool an alien with seismic perception. I dropped my hands quickly, feeling them register heavier than usual. Under other circumstances, I might think I had gained a lot of weight.
Rocky let out a concerning click.
“Grace vibration irregular,” he said, setting one hand flat against the console as the ship adjusted its angle. “You unwell, question?”
“I’m fine.” I flexed my fingers, which caused my left hand to twitch visibly against my sleeve. “This is my normal amount of vibrating.”
"But..." Rocky paused.
I managed to roll my eyes. God, the gravity was trying to crush me. "Go. I'll be waiting. You'll survive the separation."
Rocky released a bright chord, stomping his leg. "Grace experiences distress when Rocky leaves room."
"I only experience peace and quiet," I tossed back, smiling. Bantering with him was the best way of relieving my anxiety. I was me again.
I followed him all the way to the airlock. There was no reason to remain seated anyway.
"That happened many times," he chimed when working on the panel. The airlock made a hissing sound as the circulation system struggled to adjust to the immense alien atmospheric pressure.
"Go get my suit."
Rocky only seemed half-convinced I could manage on my own when the airlock sealed behind him. He disappeared from my vision. I could hear the activated pumps and a series of mechanical clunks move through the hull, followed by the deep, resonant vibration of the exterior hatch opening.
Outside was Erid. Erid was outside. The jittery excitement flooded in again, sending goosebumps rising along my arms.
I waited for a full, responsible, adult minute, just in case Rocky could feel what I was doing through the hull. Then I clenched both fists and threw them over my head.
"Yes!"
My shout bounced through the control room. I could feel my hands shaking again. "Yes. Yes! Alien planet!"
I jumped once. Erid's gravity turned that into a deeply unimpressive hop, but enthusiasm carried me through the landing.
"I made it! I'm on an alien planet! First human on Erid!"
Technically, I remained inside a ship on an alien planet. But semantics and my old English teachers could wait.
I spun around, laughed, pumped my fists again, and made a silly sound like I was an eight-year-old winning a science fair. Twelve-year-old tops. I spun again. Halfway around, I lost track of where the floor was and had to catch the wall. The rational part of my brain knew this was a highly immature act for a grown man in his forties, even if he had completed the greatest interstellar voyage in human history.
But anyway. Six years. Six years of knowing where we were going, doing all those calculations and dealing with various emergencies, I should've been prepared for this. I had imagined the landing a thousand times, but the real thing still overwhelmed me. It flattened me.
My pulse hammered in my throat. My skin felt too tight. Every sound from the cooling ship seemed both miles away and directly inside my skull.
The nausea became harder to ignore. Maybe the gravity contributed, or the temperature did, even through the ship's environmental systems. Maybe the fact that I had slept approximately four hours across the previous two days finally caught up with me, and my nervous system had simply reached its maximum capacity.
My stomach rolled as I straightened up. The sensation arrived so suddenly that I stopped laughing mid-breath.
"Oh, come on ." I pressed one hand over my mouth and ran.
I made it to the sanitation compartment just before the dry heaving started. I doubled over, dropping to my knees. Nothing came up. I had been too excited to eat much, a fact Rocky had constantly nagged me about. I braced two hands against the floor and waited while my body attempted to turn itself inside out.
After a few agonizing moments, I clawed my way up and stood before my reflection. "So dignified," I told myself, wiping away the tears stinging at the corner of my eyes with the back of my knuckles.
I looked wrecked. My face was flushed, eyes red, and my hair had chosen this specific moment to abandon all recognizable structure. For a second I genuinely worried about my debut in front of a bunch of aliens, supposedly representing the image of Earth.
Forget about Earth. I was on Erid!
I splashed water over my cheeks, and pressed cold hands against my eyes. I stood there dripping, hands gripping the sink, trying to remember whether the room had always been this warm. Could heat stroke begin inside a temperature-controlled spaceship? Excellent question.
I took several slow breaths, recalling a mindful breathing tutorial that floated into my head. It must've been from the old NASA training course.
The airlock machinery activated behind me. Rocky was back.
"Grace," he called.
Rocky's voice sounded unusually even. I noted the change and immediately forgot to investigate it. Still, hearing him again loosened something tight in my chest. I pushed away from the sink and hurried into the corridor.
"Rocky!!"
My heart pounded too hard in my ears to let me focus on other sounds. I crossed the ship at a run, then had to abruptly stop and catch the wall with one hand to remind myself that running required extra negotiation on Erid.
"I already missed you!" I shouted, laughing again despite the lingering nausea. "What did you do out there? What took you so long? Did you become too important for conversation in the last ninety seconds?"
Rocky gave no answer. This should have slowed me down, in hindsight.
The inner hatch stood wide open. Rocky waited just beyond it, his legs arranged neatly beneath him. A folded bundle rested on his hand. It looked pale and translucent. My first piece of equipment made on another planet, by another highly intelligent species , specifically for me.
My suit.
I took another deep breath to catch my breath, though my body was apparently submitting a formal complaint. I barely looked at the bundle. Rocky hadn't said anything yet, which was odd.
"Hey," I said , breathless.
Rocky remained motionless. If the rock would not come to Grace, Grace must go to the rock. So I hurried forward, dropped to my knees in front of him, and opened both arms wide.
This always worked. Rocky's legs shifted forward at once. His central body lifted, and a bright chord erupted from him, warm and wild and immediately familiar. He moved toward me with enough enthusiasm to bowl me flat, just like we used to do when we knocked each other over with our full weight.
I beamed: "There you are-- "
Rocky completed one step, then his movement abruptly stopped. My arms were still extended as Rocky held the folded suit toward me. "Grace wears contact suit before exiting ship."
"...Yeah? I guess??" I said, taking it from him.
The material felt heavier than I expected, warm from Erid's atmosphere and faintly textured beneath my fingers. Several rigid sections clicked softly against one another as I weighed it. I didn't need anymore instruction to put it on. This was like getting into an EVA suit but much easier and more flexible, almost like a second skin.
The alien warmth and the heavy fatigue in my limbs vanished immediately. I spun around to admire the magic. Those Eridian scientists really did their research. Then I looked at Rocky again.
He stood strangely symmetrical. Every part of him was locked into place. Every leg stood at a perfectly even distance. His arms rested close to his body. Even the bright, happy chords running through his carapace seemed restrained on purpose.
Eridians had no face that mapped onto human expressions, but after all those years together, I could read Rocky anyway.
This version of Rocky felt...entirely too formal.
What was that about? I opened my arms uncertainly again. "Come on. One hug, Rocky. Hug me."
I leaned toward him, and he produced a short, rough click. It sounded remarkably like an Eridian cough. I stared at him.
Had he just coughed at me?
"What?" I was even more confused. Was there something on my face? Had something happened outside?
Another brief click, louder this time, and Rocky's attention shifted past me, toward the open airlock. I followed his gaze.
Beyond the hatch, the landing platform stretched beneath the dense, amber glow of Erid's atmosphere. Equipment surrounded the ship in orderly clusters. Cables ran across the dark surface. In the distance, some large machines stood on articulated supports, their bodies vibrating with low mechanical frequencies that I could feel faintly through the deck.
Between them, stood Eridians. Dozens of Eridians. Or maybe more. They had gathered across the landing platform in curved, carefully spaced rows. I was completely dazzled by the sight of the crowd.
NASA hadn't trained me on how to distinguish one alien from another; to me, they just looked like a sea of rocks. They varied in size and shape in ways I had never seen together before. Some had broad, heavily plated bodies. Others stood narrower and taller. A few wore specialized equipment frames secured around their carapaces, ranging from metallic bands to tool-shaped devices. The air felt incredibly intense.
Everybody was oriented toward Hail Mary.
Toward Rocky. And me, of course.
Me, kneeling on the deck with my arms still flying wide open, asking one of Erid's homecoming heroes to come give me a hug.
"Oh," was the only sound I could make in the face of a new world.
Rocky remained beside the hatch, composed and dignified in a way I had never once seen during six years of living together. Outside, an entire army of rocks waited in complete silence.
*
The scale of it rushed into me all at once. I reached blindly toward Rocky and closed one hand around the nearest joint of his arm. Rocky went completely still beneath my fingers, but I barely noticed.
My vision was still struggling with the amber atmosphere, and the fact that every person in front of me looked the same. There were dozens of them. Maybe hundreds, depending on how far back the platform extended into the sulfur haze. Scientists, high-ranking officials, engineers, curious bystanders, or a very well-organized geological militia. I had absolutely no idea.
"Oh- oh my god," I whispered, staring outside. I must have looked silly. "Rocky, t-that's a lot of rocks."
I squeezed his arm again, and Rocky made a small, muted chord beside me. It was too controlled to be an open laugh, but it undeniably contained the mocking hint of one.
I turned toward him, finally finding my tongue. “You knew they were all out there!”
“Yes,” Rocky said curtly. I stared at him. He stared back at me.
I kept staring at him.
“And you thought maybe that information wasn’t relevant??”
“Grace knew Eridians wait.”
“I knew some Eridians would wait! I pictured a welcoming committee. Maybe twelve people. Fifteen if your people were feeling particularly dramatic.” I looked outside again, watching as another massive row of bodies materialized through the dense fog. “This isn't a committee, Rocky. This is an invasion force.”
Rocky’s arms remained folded neatly against his body, looking for all the world as if someone had meticulously arranged him with drafting tools. I knew Rocky’s body better than I knew most human faces. This Rocky looked like he had been thoroughly briefed by a public-relations department.
I arched a brow at him. “Are you going to check my suit now?”
A brief harmonic flicker escaped him, then vanished just as quickly. He gestured one arm toward the deck beside him, and before I knew it, I was back on my knees.
I considered arguing longer, I really did. Under normal circumstances, standing my ground would have been the correct thing to do. Under current circumstances, however, I was kneeling in front of an open airlock on an alien planet while a crowd of actual aliens waited outside, and my remaining brain cells had begun generating pure static.
“Fine,” I grumbled, pulling the material of the suit closer. “But after this, you explain why you are suddenly acting like this.”
"Like what, question?" Rocky asked when his hard fingers brushed over the flexible joints of the contact suit.
"Like...all of it. Everything." I said. As he checked the seal at my neck, then the ones at my wrist and ankles, it became glaringly obvious that I hadn't tightened a single one of them when I put the suit on by myself!
The contact suit was far more elaborate than the practice models Rocky and I had conceptualized, which really shouldn't have surprised me. Yet it was thin enough to make my movements feel entirely natural, sparking a sudden, inappropriate urge to stop everything and inspect the material under a microscope.
Rocky tightened the seal around my left calf, then moved efficiently to the next fastening. His hands were careful and gentle, but still entirely too restrained. Back on the ship, putting on an EVA suit was always accompanied by a barrage of colorful insults and complaints. Now, he worked in silence, double checking each connection. I watched him closely for a moment.
“Are you nervous?” I asked.
“No,”The answer came too quickly. “Grace raises right arm.”
I raised it. “That was a highly evasive no.”
“Grace raises left arm now.” He was bossing me around.
I complied again. “You know, I’ve spent six years learning your tells.”
Rocky simply secured the shoulder seal without a sound.
“You are acting incredibly weird,” I pressed on. “Normal Rocky would have talked my ear off the whole time.”
He completely ignored my prodding, methodically triple checking the suit until the interface screen flashed a solid green. My shoulders sagged at his sudden, overwhelming display of maturity.
I managed to get my feet under me and stood up. I took one careful step, then another. The moment the suit fully sealed, all my senses instantly sharpened. Wow. “This is incredible.”
Rocky’s formal posture loosened for the very first time since he had stepped outside. “Grace comfortable?”
“Yes.” I rolled one shoulder and flexed my fingers, marveling at the feedback. “I can actually feel the texture of the floor. "
Rocky made another restrained chord. I braced myself for his usual hum of smug satisfaction, or at least a lecture on the superiority of Eridian engineering. Instead, he turned toward the open airlock and drew himself up into that rigid, unnatural stance once more. The strange demeanor had followed him back into our living quarters. He looked almost possessed.
I reached out and touched the inner wall of the airlock. The suit transmitted the raw, metallic texture perfectly through my fingertips.
The sheer excitement surged back so violently that my knees buckled again. I grabbed the wall to keep myself upright. As Rocky angled his body toward the waiting crowd, I followed his movement, suddenly remembering that we had a massive audience.
The outer platform began to vibrate. The sensation was faint through the ship and the layers of my suit, but still coordinated. A broad, low frequency chord rose from the assembled Eridians, far too low for my human ears to catch directly. But I felt it rattle through my boots and the bones of my legs. The translator clipped to my hip hummed, scrolling a delayed series of words across my visor display.
WELCOME. RETURN. HONOR.
My throat tightened. Rocky shifted toward the hatch, extending a single arm toward the platform.
“Grace exits first,” he said.
I waited for the rest. A few seconds later, I looked at him. “What?”
“Grace exits first,” Rocky repeated again. It felt less like a suggestion and more like a command.
The tone was wrong. Wrong for him, anyway. It was calm, and low, and formal. Normally, Rocky would have explained that I went first because I was slow, or fragile, or blocking the exit. This Rocky just stood beside the opening, like an alien gentleman escorting me into a ballroom.
This rock was definitely possessed.
I looked through the hatch again. The gathered Eridians were still there. My heart started trying to climb out through my throat again.
“I hate this,” I muttered under my breath as I stepped into the airlock. Rocky moved up beside me, lagging half a step behind.
He was putting me in the spotlight. A sudden, unreasonable swell of emotion flooded my chest.
Heat pressed against the exterior of the suit. The atmosphere beyond the hatch shimmered faintly, wriggling the vision. Erid’s heavy gravity pulled steadily at every limb. For six years, Rocky had described this world to me. I had pictured being with him here countless times.
This was his home.
Rocky was right by my side. The ground beneath us vibrated with collective weight of Eridian voices. Somewhere beyond the landing platform waited the house he had built, the family he had spoken of so fondly, and the entire life that had existed long before I crashed into his universe.
The crowd’s vibrations changed the moment I stepped onto the platform. My translator struggled to process dozens of overlapping chords, spitting out a stream of broken fragments.
HUMAN. GRACE. ARRIVAL. SMALL. HERO.
We reached an open section of the platform. The nearest Eridians stood well back from me, maintaining a calculated safe distance. At this close range, their physical differences became much more obvious. Some were broader and more heavily armored than Rocky. A few were smaller, their carapaces lacking the thick plating of maturity.
I felt every single one of them watching.
Rocky stepped up to my side. The vast crowd began to quiet down, gradually at first, then all at once. The deep vibrations faded from the platform until the only sound left was the distant hum of industrial machinery. Rocky lowered his central body slightly, arranging his arms close to his sides. Then, he turned fully to face his people.
THIS IS GRACE. Rocky announced in clear, resounding Eridian. A brief pause followed. He shifted one arm toward me in an elegant, sweeping manner. GRACE IS ROCKY’S HUMAN MATE.
I snapped my head toward him.
Excuse me??
HUMAN MATE.
My brain completely stopped. Of course Rocky was my mate. We had settled that long ago, through six years of choosing to survive together every single day. Still, hearing him declare it out here, in front of his entire world, felt different. There was a world of difference between Rocky calling me that in the private play fights of our ship and this public declaration.
He continued speaking, his voice dropping into a deep register that I had only ever heard during his official, formal communications with the surface. Much lower than the voice he used with me. His chords were stripped of the playful harmonics I was used. He sounded composed. Authoritative. And, most annoyingly of all, impressive.
He continued before I could process the shock. GRACE SAVED EARTH. GRACE SAVED ERID. ROCKY RETURNED HOME BECAUSE OF GRACE.
For several long seconds, I forgot how to breathe. The crowd answered in a chord so massive that I felt the acoustic force rise into my chest. My visor instantly flooded with a wall of emotional tags.
HONOR. GRATITUDE. WELCOME. DEBT. JOY. HERO. MATE. RETURN.
I looked at Rocky, but he remained facing the crowd, perfectly composed. A textbook figure of dignity.
You could have warned me, I thought.
Then the questions began raining down from every direction at once. The first few were slow enough that I almost followed them. But within seconds,it felt like being hurled head first down a steep staircase of language.
My Eridian was good. Excellent, even, considering I had learned it from a native speaker. But now I realized with a sinking feeling that Rocky had spent six years speaking to me in baby talk; slow and simplified and tailored to my limits. The fact that we had spent six years together didn't help me at all here! Inside jokes and localized scientific terms and affectionate insults consisted mostly of my Eridian vocabulary.
This was a different beast. These people had accents! Some spoke in rapidfire abbreviations, while others utilized sentence structures so unnecessarily long that my translator simply gave up half way through. Several individuals talked over one another. Advanced technical terms flashed past my eyes before I could even identify their roots. By the time one sentence finally made sense, Rocky had already answered it and three more were already waiting in line.
I was catching maybe one word in six.
Utterly defeated, I slid down and sat flat on the ground next to Rocky. That had definitely not been part of the grand arrival plan. I pulled my knees up tightly against my chest, resting the translator across them while the suit automatically adjusted around my joints.
Rocky glanced down at me briefly. “Grace well?”
“Perfect,” I said, sarcastically scrolling through the endless translation threads. “I’m just doing some light listening comprehension.”
“Grace understands?”
“Almost absolutely nothing.”
Rocky’s chord softened for a second, a tiny ghost of his usual self breaking through. Then, he turned seamlessly back to the crowd and fielded another question.
I watched the text scroll by. An older Eridian had just asked about Rocky's physical health; I could tell they were older from the overly formal syntax even before the translator tagged it. Rocky answered with immense patience and reassurance, detailing his old injuries, his current stabilization, and the exhaustive medical checks we had completed during our final year in transit.
A group of engineers demanded specific details about the ship's modified thrusters. One of them kept cutting in with aggressive corrections, but Rocky calmly let them finish their thought, addressing each part in order.
Another Eridian addressed him using a family form. A government official stepped forward to deliver a booming, practiced speech. Two biologists started probing for data regarding the contact suit and human life span.
Another voice came in too fast for the translator:
FORMER STUDENT REQUESTS--
I looked up from the screen. Former student?
I scanned the sea of rocks and located the speaker, a smaller pebble wearing a dense framework of specialized engineering tools. Their body was angled toward Rocky in a stance I had only seen back on Earth, typically displayed by terrified undergraduates waiting to find out if a professor thought they were brilliant or complete idiots.
Rocky had students??
Then, a distant memory sparked, and I remembered I actually knew this. He had told me about his academic work, his family, and the decades of his life he had lived before Blip-A. Yet, knowing a fact in theory was one thing. Watching one of his former students anxiously rush through a complex question while Rocky listened with calm, was something else entirely.
Who even was this guy?
The Rocky I knew would gladly spend ten minutes screaming at me about the best way to secure a screw. He would intentionally repeat one of my mis-hummed chords for days just because I had begged him to stop. If I made one bad joke, he would immediately produced two significantly worse ones and then act like he was the injured party.
That was the language of our relationship. I knew every rule of that game. But this language? This persona?? It was foreign.
Rocky’s chords remained consistently low, measured, and dignified. When someone interrupted him, he simply paused and waited for them to finish without a hint of annoyance. People genuinely listened when he spoke. The younger Eridians visibly hung on his every word, while the older ones questioned him with the deep, quiet respect reserved for peers they had known for a lifetime.
A whole social map was actively assembling itself around him right before my eyes.
I had only ever known Rocky as my partner. My stubborn crewmate. My absolute favorite person to argue with. The idiot who would steal my socket wrench and then shamelessly claim it was my own fault. The person who knew exactly how I took my terrible space food, exactly how my voice strained when I was lying about being in pain, and exactly how long to wait before interrupting one of my existential spirals with a perfectly timed, awful joke.
All of this shock was simply because I had never seen him in his own element.
Oh. My ridiculous partner was a deeply respected, authoritative adult.
This idea was so funny that I almost laughed out loud. These people had no idea. They had missed the countless times this mature, highly respected public figure had hidden my flashlight just to get back at me. They had never watched him sulk for an entire afternoon because I beat him at a complex board game he had invented.
Apparently, all of Erid genuinely believed he was a calm, flawlessly competent leader.
Amused, I shifted a few inches closer to him on the deck.
Rocky noticed immediately. His rear legs adjusted smoothly until one of them rested firmly against my hip, close enough that I could feel the steady vibration of his chords humming right through the fabric of my suit. He continued speaking to the dignitaries without ever looking down.
Then, a sudden wave of irritation washed over me. Great. Now I was officially the useless alien baby under the protection of this famous, legendary rock.
Rocky shifted again, reaching down to give my arm one brief, reassuring touch before returning his attention to a biologist who was badgering him about the suit's insulation. I watched him answer. He knew these people, knew how to speak to each of them and when to end the discussion. Every few seconds, some part of his attention came back to me.
I watched the way the crowd settled around his voice. He simply seemed to know where every conversation should go, and everyone else trusted him to take it there.
I knew what was happening to me. My heart did something stupid. Rocky looked good like this. More than good, he sounded--
I cut that thought off.
His composure had no special effect on me. The way other people deferred to him had no special effect on me. The way he protected my autonomy without making a performance of it had absolutely no special effect on me.
All of these statements were lies. And deep down, I knew they were lies.
Rocky had spent six years studying me with the obsessive attention of a scientist and the sheer ruthlessness of a partner. He knew every habit I wished he remained ignorant of. If he ever discovered this version of him did something to me-- this calm, mature, publicly revered pillar of society-- he would remember.
And he would absolutely weaponize it.
He would deliberately lower his voice during a petty argument just to see how I reacted. He would stand a little straighter just to provoke me. He would use that patient, controlled, infuriatingly attractive tone to say my name, and then smugly watch me entirely lose track of the argument I had been winning.
Worse yet, it would actually work.
If Rocky ever learned this secret, I would be handing him the ultimate nuclear. And I absolutely, unconditionally refused to do so.