She had always seemed to understand that what he said and what he meant were often two entirely different things. When he shouted "I hate you" she had heard "I'm afraid". When he had been rude or ungrateful she had sensed not his anger but his pain. When they fought she had known that it was the only way he knew how to communicate. When he had pushed her away to protect her she had come back to save him.

Despite everything that he had ever done to screw things up, she had understood what he had intended.

He knew it bothered her that even now he had never told her he loved her. He couldn't. He didn't trust words. They didn't always express what you felt. They could be twisted and warped and never meant exactly the same thing to two different people. He had told her that he hated her too many times without meaning it that somehow telling her that he loved her felt almost as empty. Instead, he tried to show her. When he touched her, when he kissed her he put everything that she made him feel into it.

His pencil flew across the page. Even on paper her springy curls seemed to have a life of their own. She laughed at him from across the room. He was glad that she'd decided to let her hair grow out again.

He knew that most people couldn't quite understand what drew him to her. Most people thought that she was a flake or a kook. Most people, he concluded, were idiots. He had never thought that Maria was a flake. Not since that night so long ago when they'd stared at one another across a cheap motel room in southern Texas. That night had been the first time he had realized that being lonely and frightened and desperate for a life other than the one you had been given wasn't a uniquely alien condition. He realized that despite biology, evolution, and the fact that he was hatched he had more in common with her than he could ever have imagined.

She wasn't as poised as Isabel, but she had a grace that left him speechless. She wasn't book-brilliant like Liz, but she was his blinding light. Alex and Max were welcome to their fairy tale romances where everything went smoothly and everything made sense. He didn't mind being baffled and surprised and completely overwhelmed. Maria was fire and steel. He loved her passion and he needed her strength.

Her eyes sparkled and flashed as he sketched. It was hard to capture their luminescence on a white page with a piece of gray lead, but he tried.

She had asked him once if he would ever leave her. He had been speechless. She probably believed that he had been thinking it over. He wasn't thinking, though. Not about that. He couldn't think... couldn't imagine ever leaving her. When he finally answered it had been with the response that had immediately sprung to his mind. What he had been thinking about was why that answer felt so right.

He had realized that for the first time in his life he didn't care if he never found his way back to a planet he'd never been to, circling a star he couldn't name. It might be where he was from, but it certainly wasn't his home. His home was wherever this woman in front of him laid her head. He could live without a few answers. He couldn't live without her.

He had asked her then if she would come with him if he ever found a way back to that lost world. He hadn't been brave enough to ask if she would ever leave him. His heart had stopped beating as she looked at him silently. It had started again when she nodded. She would go with him. To Albuquerque or Arlington or Alpha Centauri, she had said.

She smiled at him, that irresistible curve of her lips. He nearly set down his pencil then, more entranced with the woman than the picture. But he was almost finished anyway.

He knew exactly why he loved her. She made him smile. She made him laugh. She made him feel wanted and needed and whole. She made him feel human. She gave him everything that he had never found anywhere else. She was everything he needed. She was sunlight and air and love. Without her he might as well try living in a vacuum.

"Don't you ever get tired of drawing me?"

"Never."

He knew she would laugh if she knew just how many sketchbooks he had filled with images of her, how many times he'd drawn her from memory over the years.

"Are you finished?"

"With the drawing," he nodded.

"Planning on starting something else, space boy?"

He grinned and put the sketchpad away.