But before I could bask in the glow of the compliment Fallon had just given me, someone who looked more like an Old-Earth depiction of a demon than my husband stepped darkly into the room. He loomed behind Fallon, his face storm and shadow, his eyes white lightning. His golden hand clamped down like a vise on the burnt-orange hide of Fallon’s shoulder. He ground out a single word.

“Sit.”

“Silar,” I said, my voice laced with wary warning. “I don’t want a repeat of whatever the hell you two were doing outside.”

“What do you mean?” Fallon inquired a little too quickly as Silar shoved him towards the chairs. Fallon was about to sit when Silar yanked him back.

“Not that one. That’s the one I made for Cherry,” Silar gritted out. “You sit on the old one.”

“It doesn’t matter which chair he sits in. I just…” I stopped, noticing for the very first time that the new chair Silar had built was decidedly smaller than the other one. It wasn’t built for a Zabrian butt.

It was built for mine.

“OK. The other chair works,” I finished lamely, even though Fallon was already sitting in it. “And I was talking about the whole tail around your neck thing.”

“Oh! Oh. That. Yes,” Fallon stammered. “Ha! That is simply… That is simply a Zabrian form of greeting!”

“Silar’s certainly never greeted me like that,” I said suspiciously.

“Well… Of course, it is a greeting between males!”

“Huh… So why didn’t the warden greet him like that on our wedding day?”

“Ha! Well. You see… The warden is… Silar… He… Are those sausages?”

I pushed a plate across the table to him. Before I could ask the big, brawny, orange Zabrian anything else, a strong hand closed around my arm and propelled me out of the kitchen and into the bedroom.

“Hey!” I said, trying to wiggle out of Silar’s stony hold. Which I should have known was an exercise in futility. But hey. They say exercise is good for you. So I did it anyway.

Silar slammed the door shut with his tail.

“I don’t know what is going on with you and Fallon,” I said, yanking hard at his grip. “But that doesn’t mean you can just shove me in here and-”

My words evaporated into a gurgling puff of air as Silar suddenly released me, only to crush me against his chest in the longest, most desperate hug I’d ever experienced.

“Si… Silar?” I said on a craggy exhale. It was hard to speak. The man was holding me like he was trying to pop my lungs like balloons.

And suddenly, all that work I’d done in the quiet kitchen to get my nerves under control and present a calm exterior was gone.

Poof. Just like that.

The tears came fast and furious, hot, salty rivers that doused Silar’s bare chest. When the moisture touched his skin, he jolted and shoved me away.

That only made me feel worse. I tried to hide my face and wipe my tears, but Silar caught my wrists in his hands and held them in the air, lowering his face to mine and scanning me with wild, white eyes.

“Is this blood?”

“What?”

“All this… this…” He let go of one wrist to cup my cheek, rubbing salty moisture beneath his thumb.

“It’s not blood,” I told him, sniffing miserably. “They’re tears.”

“Teeeeerz. That does not translate. Teerz.” He straightened, looking a little more composed now, his hard jaw set with determination. It was as if, now that he knew the word for the apparently-human phenomenon of tears, he could make a plan on how to tackle the problem.

And apparently that plan involved ripping the pillow off the bed. Then the blanket. Then over-turning the entire mattress.

“What are you doing, Silar?”

“I am looking for the book.”

“The… Oh. The human sex book?”

“Yes. The… What?” He cast me a mystified glance over a tense shoulder.

“Right. You haven’t gotten to those pages yet.” Welp. At least I was so embarrassed now that I’d stopped crying. “I put it in the drawer.”

He made a Silar sort of noise, halfway between a growl and a grunt, that I chose to interpret as grateful. He slammed open the drawer and started thumbing through the pages of the book before chucking it right back down, frustration clear on his face.

“What do the teerz mean, and how do I heal them?”

“Heal them?”

His tail lashed the floor, leaving a streak of dark blood on the boards.

“Yes. I brought you in here to check you for injuries. The teerz are the most obvious and must be dealt with first.”

“No, Silar. This isn’t an injury.”

His nostrils flared with strained breath. The man looked out of his mind. It was actually fucking adorable, in a break-your-heart-into-a-million-powdery-pieces kind of way.

“You have your white glowy eye thing,” I told him. “I guess this is the human version. We shed tears when we feel strong emotions. Or when we’re hurt.”

He let out a feral growl and crossed the room back to me.

“Then where are you hurt?”

“I’m not. Not really. My backside is going to be bruised. And my pride, I guess, for falling down at the worst possible moment out there. I… I’m so sorry, Silar.” I was about to start blubbering again. I pressed my lips together and ground my molars, willing myself not to cry.

But all that achieved was making sure that I cried silently. I stared at Silar while big, breathless tears rolled down my cheeks.

“Don’t say sorry,” Silar said, the words sounding like they were ripped from somewhere deep in his throat. “Not to me, Cherry. Never to me.”

His hands rose, like he wanted to cradle my face, to dab away my tears. But he let them fall with a miserable snap of his tail.

“You are not physically hurt. Then I have done something. Grabbed you too hard. Or… Or I should not have held you the way I did.”

“No. Not at all!” I said, sniffing hard and scrubbing my hands over my cheeks. “If anything, it’s the opposite. I really didn’t know how much I needed that hug.”

Silar’s aqua brows pinched together.

“What is a hug? That word does not translate, either.”

“You guys don’t have a word for hugging?”

“No. At least, I don’t believe so. I don’t know what it means.”

Huh. So they didn’t kiss, they didn’t hug…

“What do Zabrians do,” I asked, “to show affection?”

“I do not know.”

Something about the immediate and unguarded way he said it made me feel like I was going to start crying all over again. He didn’t think there was anything weird or wrong with what he’d just said.

Whether it was because his family didn’t give much affection to him, or because Zabrians just didn’t express themselves the same way humans did, I couldn’t be sure. But either way, his response took my heart in its hand and squeezed. Life on Terratribe I was never really easy, but mine had been blessed with more love than I knew what to do with. At least while Mama had been alive.

But Silar…

Silar had never experienced anything like that.

“A hug is… It’s like what we just did. When you held me. I mean… Do Zabrians not do that?” It had seemed instinctive enough for him.

“I do not know,” he said again. “I never saw my father do it.”

“And… Your mother? She never did it to you?” I waited, already flinching at Silar’s expected silence. I thought he’d shut down the way he had when I’d last asked about his parents.

But this time he didn’t.

“If she did, I don’t remember,” he said. “I do not know if it is a Zabrian custom or not. All I knew is that I wanted to hold you but I…” His throat worked, and his hands rose then fell, empty, once more. “I did not know if it was right.”

He didn’t know if hugging me, his wife, was right? Were these the kinds of questions my husband had been torturing himself with while I’d been pouting over feeling rejected by him?

Maybe it wasn’t that Silar didn’t have any feelings for me.

Maybe it was just that he didn’t have the first fucking clue what to do with those feelings.