"Okay," he replied almost immediately, his defensive posture seeming to melt away in an instant, suddenly compelled to tell Ray just about anything he wanted to know and wanting to know absolutely everything about him in return.

His chest hurt, though it wasn't the sort of pain he wanted to go away; he felt better with it there, complete, as strange as that idea was. He hadn't felt anything like it in centuries, but it didn't really take a rocket scientist to figure out what that feeling was.

"Your eyes are hazel," he said dumbly, like it was something Ray might have missed over the course of his entire life. Before now, Asher had just always written them off as being some unspectacular shade brown or another, but they were most definitely hazel.