Chapter 42: Question of eternity
The silence after her declaration was a physical thing, thick and heavy as the mountain fog outside. I could feel the truth of it in her stillness, in the way her breath hitched against my collarbone. It wasn’t a defiant hope anymore; it was a surrender to a terrible, inevitable fact.
I am mortal. She is not.
Her body, which had been tense with fervent conviction, slowly softened against me. A shudder ran through her, and when she spoke again, her voice was small, scraped raw.
“I can’t change it, can I?” she whispered into the hollow of my throat. “I can feel this… this life in me. It’s like a fire that won’t go out. But I can’t share it. I can’t give it to you.”
I tightened my arms around her, my own eyes burning. This was the core of it. The impossible divide. “No, baby. You can’t.”
She was quiet for a long time, just breathing me in. The scent of jasmine and warm skin was so familiar, so deeply her, that the thought of it one day being a memory was a physical pain.
“Then I’ll be here,” she said, her voice firming, finding a new kind of resolve in acceptance. “Every day. Every wrinkle, every gray hair. I’ll be right here. I’ll love every single one of them because they’re a part of you. They’re a part of our story.”
A tear escaped and traced a hot path down my temple into my hairline. I didn’t brush it away.
“And when… when it’s time,” she continued, her fingers tracing the line of my jaw, “I’ll hold your hand. I’ll be the last thing you see. I promise.”
The image was simultaneously heartbreaking and the most profound comfort I had ever known.
“And after?” I asked, my voice thick.
She shifted, rising up to look down at me. Her violet eyes were clear now, glistening in the dim light, full of a sorrow that was centuries deep. “After, I will carry you with me. Not as a ghost. Not as a sadness. But like… like this ring.” She lifted her hand, the silver band gleaming. “A part of me, always. I’ll remember the way you laugh when you’re trying to be quiet. The sound of your boots on the trail. The way you look at me, like I’m the only real thing in the world. I’ll have that. For all of my forever.”
There were no more words. What could possibly follow that? I pulled her down and kissed her, a slow, deep kiss that tasted of salt and promise. It was different from before. Less frantic hunger, more aching tenderness. A seal on a pact we both knew was true.
Later, as the first hint of dawn bled like a watercolor wash at the edge of the mountains, we were still tangled together. The candles had guttered out, leaving the room in soft, pre-detail grays. Her head was on my chest, her hair fanned out like silk over my skin.
“We should get up,” I murmured, my voice rough with sleep and emotion. “Check out of this place. Get back to the real world.”
She made a small, discontented sound and nuzzled closer. “This is the real world.”
And for a moment, in the quiet of the fading night, with her weight solid and warm against me, I almost believed her. The future, with its certain goodbye, was a shadow on the horizon. But here, now, in this room that smelled of us, she was a fact. A beautiful, impossible fact I got to keep for a little while longer.
I slid my hand into her hair, feeling the incredible softness of it between my fingers. My silver ring caught the nascent light. I closed my eyes, committing the weight of her, the scent of her, the sound of her breathing, to a memory I hoped would have to last a very, very long time.