Voices From The Stsrs - The Love of Lyran. Series name: Voices from the Stars, #5

There were days when they laughed and nights when they were silent. They made love with a quiet tenderness that had nothing to do with the body, and yet every wave of desire passed through it. After those moments, she often stayed up for a long time, just listening to his breathing and wondering how far it reached. Once he said: "On Lyra, love is not said in words. It is given in the breath." And then he leaned over, inhaled next to her ear, and exhaled slowly.
She felt the exhale change her. Time flowed like honey. The café remained open, people came, but it was no longer a place of business. It was a refuge. Everyone who entered left quieter, brighter. Leo helped her, but always differently than the others - never by speaking, just by being present. He stood by the window, watching the world, and those who saw him smiled without knowing why. An old woman once said: "The young man has a home in his eyes." Erika just nodded.
When it rained, they walked without an umbrella. "The rain cleans, " he used to say. "And if you let yourself get wet, it will take away the weight you can't see." They stood in the middle of the street, the drops running down their faces, and she felt that the world tasted like a miracle. But sometimes something changed. At night she would wake up and feel that Leo was not in bed. She would find him at the window, looking up.
"What do you see there?" she would ask. "Home, " he answered quietly. "And sometimes what's coming." "Does that scare you?" "No. But it reminds me that all light has a return."Those nights grew longer. And with them strange dreams. She would dream that she was walking through a landscape of liquid light, where every step left a golden trail. Sometimes he was there. Other times just his voice. When she woke up in the morning, she felt something calling her.
"This is not a dream, " Leo had said once. "This is a connection. Light teaches you to remember." "What?" "That the light is not up there. It is here."They sat by the fireplace in the evening, a silence around them in which souls could be heard. "Sometimes I feel like we are two people from different times, " she said. "Maybe we are, " he replied. "But time is not what separates us. Only what gives us space to love."The rain was pouring outside.
Drops ran down the glass, the lights of the lamps refracted into little stars. Leo took her hand, pulled her close to him, and let the silence speak. In that moment, it seemed that nothing else existed. Only their breath, their bodies, and the light that breathed between them. Time became a soft fabric in which they wrapped themselves without realizing it. The days were similar, but never the same; each morning had a different shade of light, a different silence.
Erika wrote down little things: how many times Leo smiled, how his voice sounded when he talked about the stars, the smell of the coffee she made for him, and how his hand lingered on her neck a second longer than necessary. These little things became memories. Leo learned to walk into town alone. He brought small gifts: a pebble that sparkled in the light, a book he said he found on a bench, or a piece of bread that reminded him of the smell of home.
"Every thing is a messenger, " he would say. "When you accept it, you hear what it brings." Once he brought a lock of hair tied with red thread. "A girl at the market gave it to me, " he explained. "She said it brought good luck." Erika looked at him for a long time. "Was she pretty?" "She was alive, " he replied. She laughed, but later, as she cleaned, she wondered why something she hadn't known before was stirring in her chest-the feeling that the world she loved would never be hers alone with her.