Valentine Michael Smith and Gillian Boardman’s relationship

Valentine Michael Smith and Gillian Boardman’s relationship joins water-brother trust to an emerging intimacy that Smith can feel before he can fully explain it. Jill’s care gives their bond its human warmth, while Smith’s efforts to protect her and his growing curiosity about kissing mark a movement from ritual kinship toward a closeness he wants to understand in full.

Water-Brother Trust

At Jubal Harshaw’s pool, Smith recognizes Jill’s fear when an armed man points her out and two others hurry toward her. Jubal’s instruction to protect her, and not to worry about wasting food or anything else, leaves Smith’s attention undivided. He acts through his Doppelganger, making the two men topple away. The scene shows the bond in action: Jill is not merely among the people Smith is guarding; she is the person whose danger determines what he does.

Afterward, the friends are shaken. Dorcas sobs while Jill holds and soothes her, a small but telling instance of Jill’s instinctive care for distress. Smith knows Jill can understand a hurt fully and at once. Though he feels apprehensive that he may not have acted rightly at the cusp, he returns to his body unharmed and resumes his earlier task. When Jill approaches him in the water, he recognizes that his water brother cannot stay submerged long without distress and prepares himself for her touch. Their physical closeness thus remains connected to practical concern for one another.

From Ritual to Intimacy

When Jill touches him, Smith takes her face in his hands and kisses her. He has learned to do this only recently and does not believe he understands it perfectly. He can, however, recognize something familiar in it: kissing has the growing-closer of the water ceremony. It also holds something more, which he very much wants to understand in perfect fullness. The moment is significant precisely because it is not yet a settled explanation. Smith knows the act as a form of connection, but senses that its meaning exceeds the ritual framework he already possesses.

Asked later what he thought of kissing, Smith answers with grave simplicity that it is goodness and growing-closer, adding that it beats card games. His serious formulation makes intimacy legible in the language he has been developing: closeness is not an embarrassment or a mere convention, but a good worth learning. The applause frightens him; seeing that Jill and Dorcas are not frightened helps him calm himself and wait. His response also shows that public attention is not the same as private understanding: he can name what he values, even when he cannot join in the surrounding display of pleasure.

Jill, Ben, and Responsibility

The relationship takes shape alongside Jill’s bond with Ben Caxton. When the conference is postponed, Ben has time to recover and to hear about his missing week. Mike quickly understands that Jill and Ben are water brothers, asks Jill about the relationship, and solemnly offers water to Ben. The ritual extends trust across the three of them rather than treating Jill’s bond with Mike as a claim that excludes her other relationships.

Ben’s feelings for Jill become more serious after his ordeal. He identifies jealousy of the closeness between Jill and Mike and decides he must cauterize it. He also recognizes that the Man from Mars is Jill’s patient, not a rival, and understands her maternal care for him as part of the character he loves. Ben proposes again, plainly declaring his love and asking Jill to marry him. Jill tells him she loves him, but asks him not to ask her to marry him now: she has responsibilities. Her answer distinguishes love from immediate availability. It gives her bond with Ben its own emotional reality without undoing the intimacy developing between her and Smith.

A Relationship Still Unfolding

Jill’s responsibilities remain unspecified in these scenes, and Smith’s newly discovered desire for a fuller understanding of kissing remains open rather than resolved. The relationship is therefore presented as a process: water ceremony supplies a language for trust; protective action and care give that trust concrete form; kissing introduces a different, desired depth. Smith’s words do not claim mastery. They register a sincere beginning, while Jill’s response to Ben makes clear that her attachments and obligations cannot be reduced to a simple romantic choice.

The bond’s defining tension is between what Smith already understands and what he is still learning. He can recognize Jill as his water brother, sense her fear, act decisively to protect her, and identify kissing as goodness and growing closer. Yet the intimacy contains something he cannot yet fully grok. That gap gives the relationship its movement: closeness is both an established practice and an unfinished discovery.