His Harry couldn’t be an alien.
His Harry.
Harry.
“You said your name was really Harry,” Adam said, closing his eyes for a moment. “Was that another lie?”
Harry shook his head. “You could say it’s a nickname for my name. I liked it so much that I told my family to call me Harry. It is my name now. I swear.”
“And what is your given name, then?”
Harry pulled a face. “Humans can’t pronounce it. I’m not sure you’ll even hear all of it.”
Leaning back against the window sill, Adam crossed his arms over his chest. “So what is it?” He caught Harry’s eyes lingering on the muscles of his arms and chest and nearly laughed when his cock twitched in response to the appreciation in Harry’s eyes. Bloody hell. Harry was telling him he was an alien, but apparently his body didn’t give a damn.
Harry said something softly. It sounded like music.
“What?” Adam said.
Harry repeated it slower, “Harht’ngh’chaali. That’s my full name.”
Adam’s brows furrowed. That was quite a mouthful. “And what does it mean?”
“Well, Harht is my first name, I guess, though not really. It’s hard to explain it in human terms. Chaali is the name of my clan. The ‘ngh’ means... high, I guess.”
“High?” Adam said.
Harry shrugged. “Some things are hard to translate. I guess you could say it means royal or noble, maybe.” Harry frowned, looking pretty frustrated with his inability to explain it.
Adam blinked slowly. “Royal?”
Harry scrunched up his nose. “My mother is a queen.”
“A queen,” Adam repeated. “As in, the queen of the planet?”
“No!” Harry said with a laugh.
Thank fuck.
“Our planet has twelve grand clans,” Harry said. “Which are like kingdoms, I suppose.” He frowned again. “Sometimes the translating chip is so useless. I would never call our grand clans kingdoms, but that’s what it comes up with as the next best thing.”
“The translating chip?”
“Yeah, it’s a chip we have under our skin. Our chips are connected to our brains and help us learn foreign languages quickly, but it’s not faultless.” Harry chuckled. “You should have seen how I sounded the first day on Earth! No one could understand me! But by the third day, I finally got pretty good at your language.”
“You learned English in three days?” Adam said. For some reason, that was more mind-boggling than anything else.
Harry nodded. “My parents always said I had a natural knack for languages,” he said, not without pride, and smiled.
Adam wondered how it was possible to be so angry at someone and also be so endeared by them at the same time.
Inwardly, he laughed at himself. Apparently even the fact that Harry was an alien didn’t change a thing. A year apart, and he still had it as bad.
A year.
“It’s been a year, Harry,” Adam said. “Why did you leave? Why come back now?”
“I don’t know where to start,” Harry said slowly.
“From the beginning would be good.”
Harry chewed on his lip. “Long story short, my parents originally sent me to Earth as punishment for my misdemeanor. I used my familiar link to my sister to learn her secret and was caught. Technically, it was a crime. My parents were angry. They sent me to Earth to ‘learn some responsibility.’” Harry looked at him. “You have to understand that I couldn’t tell you that I was an alien. There are—were—laws forbidding it. I told you the truth: the first time I left, my parents simply had me transported back without any warning.”
“And you couldn’t even say goodbye?”
Harry shook his head. “I didn’t know they were going to teleport me back. The TNIT— transgalactic teleporter—takes just a few seconds. It locked on my identification chip and transported me back.”
Adam gave him a pinched look.
Harry’s shoulders sagged in defeat. “You don’t believe me.”
“I do,” Adam said with a sigh. “It’s just pretty hard to wrap my mind around aliens, teleporters, identification chips and...” He shook his head. “Go on. So your parents transported you back. Why did you return? With that friend of yours?”
“I told you—Seyn helped me get here. My parents had forbidden me to go back to Earth. And legally, I couldn’t visit a pre-TNIT planet more than once a year. So Seyn had to ask his friend from another planet to sneak us in.”
“And why did Seyn tag along?” Adam said.
Harry pulled a face. “He wanted to get rid of his bond.”
“His bond?”
“It’s a long story,” Harry said. “I could show you, if you would like? It would be faster and easier. I promise I won’t pry into your thoughts.”
Adam studied the earnest expression on his face. After some hesitation, he nodded stiffly.
Harry beamed at him. “Just look me in the eye.”
Adam braced himself, but he still wasn’t prepared for the sudden onslaught of thoughts and memories that weren’t his. Fuck. There was so much information on Harry’s culture, on the bond thing, on how it limited Harry’s race’s senses and hindered their telepathy.