I woke up before James, and I wasn't quite sure what to do. 

He was peacefully sleeping, the kind of sleep that takes away every line of worry and makes the person seem so much younger than they really are. 

I didn't want to be creepy or anything, but I stayed there for awhile just watching him sleep. The way his chest moved with each breath, the way his eyebrows twitched every so often.

It reminded me of when I shared a room with my best friend Maya. We were sixteen, and everyone moved out at sixteen. We got this crappy room in a building on the west side of town. The west side was an absolute dump, the kind of place that still used tech from the late twenty third century. 

I would always wake up before her and watch her sleep. It wasn't creepy at all because I'd known her since I'd learned to walk and she was basically my sister. Although Maya wasn't like James. Her skin was always flawless and she always had her hair perfectly straight like a shampoo commercial or something.

James was different. His skin was smooth but it was intricate, laced with freckles and beauty marks every so often. His eyelashes were long and his eyebrows were messy. His hair needed to be cut badly, but even still. He had the kind of beauty that you couldn't find in a magazine.

Suddenly his eyes were open and all I could look at was the brown of them. I wanted to look away, how weird of me because I didn't. 

I wondered what he saw when he was looking at me. Light green eyes that the sun liked to terrorize, curly blonde hair that was hardly blonde it had so many brown streaks in it. I wondered if I was the same kind of beauty he was, or if maybe I was just another meaningless poster on someone's wall.

"What?" he shook me out of my trance.

"Oh," I looked away finally and stared at the ceiling. I knew that my cheeks were probably red like tomatoes.

He breathed out and looked at the ceiling as well. We lay there for a really long time just staring at the grass that had been woven together to form a thick layer against rain, and snow if it snowed here.

"We have lots of work to do before winter comes," James said. He slowly pulled the blanket up and I realized how cold it was. He opened a little port in the roof and started a fire. That helped.

I just nodded because I was in a trance again. I was thinking about Maya and moving out at sixteen, and that time I kissed Alexander when I was twelve and he was older, and my parents yelling at me for crashing their hover car once, and... and how my entire old life was suddenly over.

I no longer was Lara Denise, eighteen year old pilot in training. I was just another story people would tell every time planet Exion was mentioned.

"Did you hear about those two kids that died on Exion?"

"Yeah. A real shame."

And that would be it. No one would ever come, because why bother? Exion was the planet of death and anyone who tried to save someone on it died. The end.

So there was James and there was me. That was it.