“Okay. I get it.” I curled back into his chest. “I’ll be a bit nicer about Morg from now on. After I smack her around a bit.”
Mike laughed, but a long, ringing sound took all the joy from the sound—the first stroke of midnight echoing as though there were no walls between the grandfather clock in the library and me. I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms all the way around Mike’s neck, standing on my toes to hold onto him just that little bit tighter. The smell of him took me to a place in my mind where I once wore a dress that was blue, on a magical night of masks and autumn leaves. I tried to hold on to the hope I had back then that, in eleven more tolls, David would come for me.
The second toll drew my thoughts to the lake—to that rainy day when David first found out I had feelings for Mike—the day I thought I’d lose him for good. I could still smell the crisp rain and the muddy ground, still feel the cold of the wind on my wet skin. Could still see how green David’s eyes looked against a grey sky—see them focused so intently on me, as if I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
“There’s nothing to work out,”
he’d said to me, anger and heartbreak battling for the expression on his face.
“You love Mike, and you don’t want immortality.”
“I never said that. Please, we can make our own future. I believe in magic still. I believe there’
s hope for us—for our lives, tog—”
“Shh.” He placed a finger over my lips and brought his face down to align our eyes. “No, Ara, my love. It is all too clear to me now. I have to be the strong one, for both of us, and you have to be the one that goes on. You must go on, have babies, beautiful babies, and be happy—live that dream.”
“Don’t you get it, David?” I shook my head. “You’re the only dream I want to live.”
“Precisely.
Live
. You’ve been waiting for me to tell you I’ll stay, that all of this is some nightmare. But, my love—” His eyes softened, a hundred years of sadness flaming within them. “It’s not.”
I managed one syllable before the smoke of his words stung my eyes, forcing the volcanic eruption of blubbering.
“Don't cry, sweetheart. I love you, and you will always belong to me. But I can’t keep lying to myself, believing you’ll change your mind.”
“But, maybe I will.”
He shook his head again. “Even then, it would only be to save me from eternal solitude. And for that reason, I just can’t take your dreams away. Your human life is your greatest gift and my greatest sacrifice.”
I sniffled, wiping my hand over my nose. “It doesn't have to be that way.”
“It does, my love. Look—” He pointed to a blue and black butterfly, dancing in the shelter of a silky leaf. “You see, you’re much like that butterfly.”
“How?”
He wrapped both arms around my waist from behind, tucking his chin against my shoulder. “She started her life in the shadows, close to the ground. She lived and existed only as others saw her; a caterpillar, nothing more. Then, one day, she bloomed into a beautiful, brightly-winged creature—so free, so pure. Something she could never have been had someone taken her away.
“Her life is short in comparison to most. But she will live each moment, flying, spreading her beauty, her life through the treetops, so that when her existence comes to an end, as the sun goes down on her final day, her spirit will go on and there will always be a beautiful butterfly to carry on her name.” David kissed the top of my ear, smoothing his hands against the skin on my belly just under my top. “I love you, and your spirit will go on. As long as you have happiness, I have everything I will ever desire.”
“But what will you do without me?”
“I am the rain.” He looked up at the sky; I looked too. “I exist each clouded day whether the butterfly flies or falls. A human life is but only a blink in the eye of eternity. I will go on when you are gone, I will have no choice.”
“Go on, or
move
on?”
His arms tightened around me. “I will never move on. The pain I will feel for eternity without you is a sacrifice I am willing to make to save you from forever longing, wishing you’d been given the chance to live. I owe that to you—” He nodded once. “For the love I feel, I owe that to you.”
“So that’s it? You’re making the decision for me?” I turned to face him.
“I have to, Ara. I’ve been watching, waiting, scanning your thoughts to find some hint of promise for us. But you don't, anywhere in your thoughts, want to be a vampire. And yet, you keep making me wait for your answer. And stupidly, I keep waiting.”
I had nothing to say. He was right. Life was just too important. I’d seen it in action; the beauty, the magic it had to offer. And I feared, if I gave that up for immortality, I’d never forgive myself, or worse, never forgive David. “Just give me two weeks more. For forever, please? Just let me have the last two weeks.”
“Two more weeks?” He stepped back. “While you spend those days with another man—one you happen to love?”
My head hung in shame. “Please don’t hate me for loving him, David. I loved him for such a long time before I ever even knew you existed.”
“I do know that.” He exhaled, stepping into me. “I just … I suspected it. I'm actually angrier at myself, Ara—for not listening to my own gut—again.”
“What would you have done if you’d asked me and I’d told you I loved Mike?” I rolled my face up to look at him. “Would you have left?”
“That’s the stupid thing about all of this.” He sighed, casting his gaze to the heavens.
“What’s stupid?”
“That, even if you had admitted your feelings for Mike—” he touched my cheek and smiled, “—there’s no way I’d have left you.”
“Then don’t leave yet.” Hope filled me. “Give me the nights—for two more weeks. Please?”
“You don’t even need to ask. You know I will. How can I not savour those last few nights?”
I melted against him again. “Thank you, David.”
After a moment, he turned my face so my blue eyes met his shimmering green windows. “I just need to hear you say it, though—from your own lips.”
“You mean…that I’m not coming with you?”
He nodded.
“I haven't made my mind up yet.”
“Please stop playing these games, Ara-Rose. Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth, David. My mind makes up its mi—well, my mind makes decisions all the time; doesn’t mean I agree with them.”
“Stop it.” He drew back a little further. “Ara, just say it. Just tell me you’re not coming with me.”
“No. Because that’s not what I’ve decided on.” I folded my arms.
David turned away from me, extending his arm to grasp a tree branch. “You will eventually have to say it, Ara. Either way, a decision has to be made. Wholeheartedly or not.”
“Okay, then … ask me on the last day of our two weeks—that way I can be sure you’ll stick around.”
“The night of the Masquerade?”
“Yeah. It’s perfect.” I carefully touched his elbow until he turned to face me. “You can ask me on the last dance.”
“The last dance?” He dropped his hand from the branch, his brow staying up in an arch of mockery. “On the last stroke of midnight?”
I nodded, smiling. “Perfectly corny.”
The eleventh ring brought me back to the present, days by the hundreds rushing past me in a painful flash of all that had been lost. All that had been destroyed. All of it my fault. And the hope I held onto back then, when I was just a girl at a masquerade, died as the twelfth toll ended and the last song began.
Mike stepped back and smiled down at me, his face changing when he noticed my tears. He swiped them away with his thumbs. “Ara.”
“I’m okay.” I dried the remainder. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“Sorry I’m late,” said a smooth, milky voice. I looked past Mike to a tall, dark-haired man in a plain black mask and the navy-blue Ceremonial Dress. His lip quirked in a cautious half-smile when I opened my mouth and nothing came out. “Can I steal you—for the last dance?” he asked, the smile completing itself.
My stunned eyes moved from his beautiful face, past the high collar and down his arm to his long, elegant fingertips as he offered his hand.
Mike laughed and moved away, making some crack about kidnapping, and left me there, in the middle of the dance floor, completely alone and lost for words.
David reached down and stole my hand, unclenching my fingers and folding them loosely against his. “It’s okay, Ara. I’m not here to hurt you.”
I snapped out of it then and finally inhaled. “I know.”
“Then relax,” he said softly, his deep voice vibrating through his throat. And as he drew me closer by the small of my back, my belly met his and he smiled down. “We don’t fit like we used to.”
“Do you mean that metaphorically?”
His secret smile indented his cheek, but that was all the answer he gave. I followed his lead then while the music played on, a series of soft, rising and falling notes, telling our story from beginning to end. We moved to our own pace, our own steps, letting the rest of the world move unheedingly around us. I could breathe here, in this moment, in his arms, as I’d not been able to breathe in so long. And as he rested his jaw against the top of my head, I could feel that same sense of relief in him. Which gave me hope.
He drew a long breath quietly through his nose and leaned back, looking into my eyes like he was seeing them for the first time. His pupils rounded and darkened, sweeping across my lashes and entering me like he saw a future there he’d never seen before. A future I could see too. I wished I could die right here in his arms—that Heaven would be the moment you lived last, repeated over and over for eternity. That was the only future that mattered to me anymore. I just needed it to matter to him, too.
The dim yellow glow around us offered more shadows than light, giving a kind of magical privacy to the scene, and the flow of skirts and graceful strides of long legs closed us in, keeping us alive here in this cage of secret thoughts—a cage we were, for once, both inside.
It wouldn't matter what he said to me after this. He couldn't deny it any longer…
“I still love you,” he said, stealing my thought—stealing the knowledge I just now had the strength to admit.
I lowered my head and nodded against his lips, wrapping my small fingers around the bend of his hand a little tighter.
“When this ends…” He kissed my head. “Don’t pull away. Just let me hold you—just let none of it matter anymore.”
“None of what matter?” I asked in a whisper.
“What I did to you,” he said, his breath of a voice moving into my ear, so quiet no one would have heard.
I brushed my cheek along his mouth, closing my eyes and blocking out everything. “It never did. I never stopped loving you.”
He leaned back a bit and frowned down at me as my eyes opened. “You said you hated me.”
“And even when I hate you, I still love you.”
His hand shook against mine, that forced composure slipping, as if the damage those words did was just too much for his insides—the agony coming up out of his stomach in a jagged breath. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness.”
“Neither
do I.” I smiled up at him with a small, timid shrug. “Guess we deserve each other.”
He released my hand and swept his thumb softly down my cheek, tucking a lock of my hair behind my ear. “It’s been very painful without you.”
I rolled my face into his touch, my long lashes covering my eyes for a second. And I knew the words I wanted to say, but none of them mattered. Truth was, he knew how I felt—he knew how much it killed me to be without him too. But all this time, everything we suffered was suffered because we were never united, never honest with each other. Never open. Holding him this way made every fibre of my being want to do anything in the world to keep us together, to stop anything like this happening ever again. That’s the only way I could bear to break apart when the song ended.
“Make me a vow,” I said. “Promise me that, no matter what, we will never keep secrets from each other again.”
He shook his head softly. “I can’t make you that promise, Ara, because there will be times I must do that to protect you. But I will promise you that, from this day forth, I will trust you—trust you to make your own decisions, trust you with my heart, and I will never, not for any reason, lie to you.”
I held perfectly still, watching his eyes fill with fear as he clearly read what was in mine. I shook my head. “Secrets nearly destroyed us, David—”
“No.” His thumb cupped my lip. “
Lies
nearly destroyed us—my lack of trust and faith in you, Ara. My inability to listen. I will never let that happen again, I swear this. But I cannot promise not to keep things from you—”
“
I
can,” I said simply.
He smiled lovingly down at me, his green eyes soft with a kind of warmth I hadn’t seen since the earliest days we met, and the reason I fell for him then came shining through in my heart, reminding me what it meant to love just one person, wholly and unconditionally. “You know what?” he said. “I
know
that’s true. You’ve shown me so much strength, Ara—so much honesty, that you’ve taught me a thing or two about it. But—”