Jason paced his— their, now— apartment, while pretending, with all the skill of a man who had once faked his own death, that he wasn’t pacing. He had a dishrag in his hand and a coffee mug in the other, which gave him the very convincing appearance of someone in the middle of doing chores. Chores, in theory, required motion. Pacing also required motion. It was all very easy to confuse, if you didn’t look too closely.

The problem was that Jason had been walking the same path between the couch and the kitchen counter for the better part of twenty minutes. The mug had been washed three times already. The coffee table had been wiped down so aggressively that it now gleamed like it had just come out of the factory. And the dishrag, limp in his hand, smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and quiet desperation.

It wasn’t his fault. It was today’s fault.

Because today marked exactly two days past the deadline his fiancé had given him for when he’d be returning. Two whole days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand, eight hundred, and eighty minutes—Jason had done the math. Twice.

Ask anyone else, and they’d say there was nothing to worry about. His partner had just gone to visit home, and people visited home all the time. That was normal. Totally routine. Humans did it, aliens did it—there was nothing inherently suspicious about the concept.

But Jason’s fiancé’s home was Tamaran. Which was not on Earth. Or in the solar system. Or within the convenient range of a plane ticket and a bad airport coffee. It was light years away, reachable only by spaceships piloted by people Jason had never met, following star maps Jason didn’t understand, through regions of space Jason very much didn’t trust.

So, naturally, Jason was worried.

Two days late, to his fiancé, was probably the equivalent of being twenty minutes late in a very professional Tamaranean sense of time and space. Jason had heard him joke about it before—how his people measured “soon” and “a little late” in wildly different increments than humans. But Jason didn’t have that alien patience. What he had was two very human days, undiluted and heavy, stretching out like an interrogation room clock.

And, to make things worse, the alien GPS device his fiancé had left him was not helping. Supposedly, it was connected to some Tamaranean travel network, pinging location updates in real time. In practice, it flickered like an old television, jumping coordinates every time Jason tapped the screen. Half the time it claimed his fiancé was “en route,” and the other half it claimed he was “enjoying refreshments.” Jason had no idea what that meant in space travel terms, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

The apartment felt too quiet without him in it. No low rumble of his voice trading sarcastic remarks. No quick, dry comebacks that made Jason have to fight a smirk. No warm, unguarded laugh that slipped through sometimes when Jason wasn’t expecting it. The absence was almost loud in itself.

Jason had tried to fill it with noise—went for a run, cleaned his guns, reorganized the fridge alphabetically (don’t ask), even made it halfway through the first page of a book that had been gathering dust on the coffee table. But every task eventually dissolved into the same loop: pacing, glancing at the door, checking the glitchy GPS, sighing, pacing again.

He ran a hand through his hair, muttered something under his breath about alien punctuality, and was halfway toward the kitchen again when the sound finally came—keys rattling in the lock.

Jason froze. His body reacted before his brain caught up—shoulders tensing, pulse quickening, the kind of gut-level recognition that didn’t need confirmation. The door swung open, letting in a draft of cool air from the hallway.

Boots stepped inside first, solid and sure. Then came the familiar figure, tall and broad-shouldered, framed by the doorway’s light. And before Jason could even take a step forward, a strong, hand hooked the back of his hoodie and lifted him straight up.

"Air Jail." He murmured, absolutely not looking like a disgruntled kitten.