Her brow furrowed as her eyes shifted over my image. She had no idea why I would think anything was wrong, and she was waiting for me to confess the worst.
“I should just start at the beginning.” I glanced around. “This is where Drake and I grew up together, or at least ran away to when we could not take the pressure of the roles given to us…he was my best friend, my only friend for a very long time.”
Those eyes of hers grew wide with shock as she looked around for the first time.
The makeshift camp was weathered, but you could see the hammocks we had under the shelter, you could see the outline of the fire pit. The stones that sheltered our equipment to dive.
“What are you trying to tell me? You knew him? Before? You knew about me? The nightmares?” There was no anger, no there was only more anxiety and confusion.
“In a sense. I knew he dreamed of someone. I knew he vowed to never find her, for he feared what Donalt would do. But we didn’t dwell on that. We came here to escape. You only came up on lingering nights when we laid exhausted from our day. We both spoke of you but never knew you were the same girl.”
“You spoke of me, but what I looked like never came up?”
“It did.”
She just stared at me. That little crease between her eyes was deep, telling me she was rehashing it all—every moment she saw me and Drake side by side. She was remembering everything I had ever said to her about him.
“I told you, Willow, I always saw your soul in our dreams. The details of your image didn’t matter to me then any more than they do now. You are not merely beautiful to me…you are the only beauty I have ever seen. No words could justify how breathtaking every inch of you is to me.”
“My soul,” she said under her breath. “Why now? Why are you telling me this today, of all days? The triangle is behind us.”
“It was never in front of us.”
She stared at me with wide eyes, with her lips slightly parted. From the outside looking in, she had never looked more lost. “My memory is cruel right now, Landen. What I had rage for in my past, I now have fear for. We fought over him with both words and silence, and all the while you were not fighting with some dark prince. You were fighting with your best friend. I never got it.”
I never really saw it that way—if I knew him or not, I would have treated Drake the same way—but now, looking at her, I felt even worse. “Got what?”
“Why you let him say what he said—do the things he did—sent me to speak to him alone. I thought it was because you trusted me. Because you knew that I loved you. That nothing could come between us.”
“And you doubt that now?” I asked with an ache in my chest.
“I’ve never doubted how I felt about you, but I fear that you have. Were you just giving him a chance? What was that at the end? Those fights between you and him? Were you scared he was getting close?”
Those fights between Drake and me were nothing less than human. He could have been my brother, and I would have still charged him. What man wouldn’t when he saw another man reaching for what was clearly his?
“Drake has never given me doubt. I didn’t understand why he was the one between us—why anyone was now or in the past. But…I had to let you go.”
“Let me go,” she breathed as she covered her mouth and stepped back. A wave of blue washed over her eyes for an instant. I leaned forward, surely with an expression that was full of shock, which only confused her more.
“Do you feel me?” I asked her. “You said the other night you could feel emotions if you wanted to—that they were just muffled.”
She moved her head from side to side as she dropped her hands, and took a deep breath, and held her chin up slightly, a gesture she always did just when she decided to fearlessly face what was before her. But right now she was not fearless; she was trying to be mad. I could feel her fight for that emotion, but she could not reach it. Instead, she was hurt, and that was stabbing my soul.
For so long, she and I hadn’t bothered to use words, at least not as much as most couples do. We felt each other on every level. You would think that would make life simple, that we would automatically understand one another, but that thing is we cannot read each other’s thoughts. We had no idea what exactly we were mad, sad, scared, or even jealous of. We could always assume. We were looking at the same thing when we felt those emotions, but circumstance had led us both there for different reasons.
I thought back over every word I’d said since we had been here—knowing that she could not feel me right now made me feel like an ass. She couldn’t feel the pain in my heart, the regret for keeping that friendship between Drake and me from her. Without emotion, my words fell flat. Nothing more than sounds that carried no life.
Carefully, I stepped forward and let my thumb trace the bottom of her eye, which was now green. My fingertips were hungry for the touch of her smooth skin, and they fell down her cheek across her collarbone, finally reaching for her waist and pulling her to me and leaning my forehead to hers.
“I let you go because I loved you. I never had a single doubt that you were mine…the pain I felt as I watched you with him confirmed that.”
A tremble went through her body as she closed her eyes. I pulled her lips to mine, carefully allowing us to melt together. Her lips danced with mine, flesh to flesh, but she was holding back, and rightly so.
“It terrifies me to let you go, but each time I do,” my tongue wisped against hers, and she let out a near silent moan, “you come back to me.” I deepened our kiss, wanting to hear her body respond to me once more. Her nails dug into my arms. “You always come back to me.” I pulled away slowly, leaving a whisper of a kiss on her bottom lip. “The only reason I ever completely mastered fear was because of you.”
“I never leave.”
I felt a vibration under my lips. Actually, it was more like a volt of energy, one that was demanding that I did not retreat from the passion I had sparked. In shock, I pulled away and glanced down. There was the slightest fading glow on her lips.
“Open your eyes.”
As she did, the wash of blue was there and gone again. Dear Creator, she was truly trapped in there, she was trying to rise, to let me see the real her. I had no choice but to tell her that I could see that fight, that I knew when she was rising and when she was hiding.
I braced her in my arms as gently as I could before I spoke my next words. “I dreamed of a blue-eyed girl, and he dreamed of green-eyed girl.”
She started to sink in my arms. Her legs had given out. You would have thought I’d sucked the life out of her. I was the brilliant one that decided to wait until now, the very last moment, to confess that sin. Confusion was coursing through her soul. She was in my dreams with me, and could not figure out why I was denying them now.
“Your soul. The color of light that beams from your soul—from your eyes, is blue, Willow. You are mine.” My arms flexed around her; they were trembling with raw emotion.
Strength came back to her instantly. I felt her tense in my arms as her gaze rose to meet mine. It was emerald, no blue to be seen. I was starting to understand what Justus had said to her. For the first time ever, I understood my dreams. I understood that her ego had changed the shade, not the herbs that Drake had given me. Her ego came to her defense. Her anger for her disposition had put that barricade between her soul and the rest of the world. Between her and me.
“What’s happening to me?” she asked.
“I think you’re trying to let your soul rise for the first time in this life. That is our war right now, Willow. To face the future set before us, we have to be soul-to-soul. We have to trust each other with our entire selves. We have to forgive each other and ourselves for the wrongs we have committed.”
She closed her eyes softly and took in slow breaths. She was trying to quiet her mind. I knew her expressions well enough to know that she was not faring well. I was her rock, her anchor, someone who had little to no flaws in this lifetime when it c
ame to her, and I had just shattered that by revealing an unspoken lie. I was going to have to help her face her fear before I revealed any more.
“I don’t like fear,” she thought. It was as if she had been listening to my thoughts. She always had that power, that uncanny way of saying what I was thinking, or answering an unasked question. I stayed in a constant state of wonder at her side.
“I never have. I had to shelf it long ago. It was the only way I could find the will to help my images. The only way I could find the will to fall asleep on the night of the new moons. I put fear aside so I could see you those nights. I even had some thin line of hope that one of my images would lead me to you. And in a way, I was right. I found you, and then I had no choice but to push fear further back; otherwise, I would never have left Franklin, stepped into that string.”
She covered her mouth and tried to turn away so I could not see her eyes welling with tears. “I’m not heartless. I was always afraid on some level. I did tremble when I faced Donalt. But, each day I became less afraid…angrier. I just wanted bliss. I wanted to live without regret. Without fear that someone was going to rip us apart. Now I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be afraid, but I don’t want to be mad either.”
“You have to face it. Trust that I am right here, that I will love you so fiercely that no one would ever dare to bring harm to you.”
“I’ve always had that trust.”
Her voice was hollow. I felt her pain. She had no idea how deep she was inside herself. She thought she had given me everything, given us everything. I hated myself for not coming out and asking her outright for this trust in the first place.
“It’s not fair to have to live it all over again,” she thought.
The illusions of the past were going to eat her alive as our home called us to make a stand. This was the worst of Saturn and Neptune rolled into one. I wasn’t going to let her mind get the best of her if it was the last thing I did. I had to make her see how far she had come today alone.
“No, it’s not, but listen,” I thought as I pulled her chin up and searched her eyes. “When you woke up today, blue waved across your eyes, and every time you touch on a deep emotion it’s there again. That’s you. Fighting to get out. Your skin is humming, there is a glow under my touch…you’re fighting to come out.”
“My skin glows? My eyes are changing? And you’re good with that? That doesn’t seem odd at all to you?” She rushed her hands through her long, dark hair as she clearly fought to grasp a thought, to understand what the hell I was trying to tell her.
I bit my lip as I let out a sigh.
“The humming flesh, the glow…that is something that all soul mates in Chara sense and see with each other. That is something that, up until recently, we have been lacking.”
She stepped back abruptly. “We’re lacking a connection? Is that what you are saying? After dreaming every night together—being soul-to-soul, living life after life together, you’re telling me now we are lacking a connection?
If this were a few days ago, I would be standing in the center of a hurricane, wrath would have been her weapon, and rightly so. Yet, right now she wasn’t mad, she was anxious. Scared that I was going to walk away from all of this. She still had no idea that she was my entire life.
“No…I’m saying that you have been well sheltered in your vessel. I can’t tell you that I always knew that or assumed it. I never lied. I see your soul when I’m with you. I see everything I’m in love with. The color of your eyes, I saw that as my fault. I saw that as me not trying hard enough to connect with you.”
She stared at me as if I were a mad man; maybe I was. I envisioned this revelation going any way than it was. There was sympathy in her eyes. She felt bad that I endured this on my own, that I knew this truth and she didn’t.
“Why didn’t you tell me? You know you are the only one I trust without question. Why would you not just say, ‘Hey, Willow, back in the day before all this hell on Earth stuff, your eyes were blue. Why don’t you muse on why that changed?’”
I brushed my hands through my hair, swallowed a curse. “I know I could have. I could give you a million reasons. I could lay this out day by day, tell you what was going through my head every chance I had to bring it up, but honestly, Willow, we don’t have time to relive the past. We have to live now. If Justus is right, then your ego is large and in charge, or it was, and side-by-side with your ego was mine. I wanted to fix this curse, I wanted to prove that myths, scrolls, and whatever else could be told to go to hell. That we had free will and if we didn’t want to do something, then so be it. I failed at that. I failed you. I was too busy looking for a way out of this—to give you bliss, that I neglected to help you break out of this cage. And now some unseen force has seen fit to make you learn this the hard way. I want to take the pain. I want to feel the fear for you. I want to give you every reason to trust me enough to come out of that shell you’re in.”
Those sweet lips of hers parted in shock. “I’m not hiding from you. I didn’t think I was hiding from anything. I thought I was pushing through.”
And I knew that. I knew that and let her do that. “I thought we both were, but all we did was stand back-to-back and fight. We put a wall between us, we lost our innocence…long before this life.”
“Then tell me how to get it back. How do I make it through these flashbacks, this cringing fear, and come out of it with any sanity at all?”
Even without anger, she was still a fighter. For a second, I just stared in awe at her, not knowing how I managed to become the lucky fool that shared a soul with her.
“When those moments come, I want you to remember the end. Not when we brought down a part of Donalt, not how bad it became after the visions you see, but the end. See me holding you, see us dancing under the stars, find those fleeting moments we fought tooth and nail for…fear only exists because we do not know the outcome. You know the outcome of those flashbacks.”
“I don’t know the outcome of now. Why Justus is calling me what he is. Why you and Phoenix looked as if you had just been given your last rites when he spoke to you in the field. I don’t know what’s going on in Esterious, but I know I don’t...I can’t go there right now.”
“You don’t feel called to Esterious right now?”
She clenched her chest and squinted her eyes closed as if she were in pain. “I just don’t think I’m supposed to be there right now. My…my soul wants to be in Chara. Even now, I want to rush back. I want to protect it, but I don’t know why.”
Moments like this, I can always hear random words of wisdom my grandfather used to speak over me. I can’t even remember why he said it, but I clearly remember him raising a brow to me and saying, ‘Never underestimate a woman’s intuition.’
Willow was feeling called to Chara, a sign my family would rejoice for if they knew of it.
She was confusing the life out of me, though. Not more than two hours ago, she told me she was ‘not done.’ She led me to believe she saw right now as just another step toward a fate that was waiting on us, but with that last statement—it was like she wanted to commit to Chara and Chara alone. My grandfather never told me what to do when a woman’s intuition took her in two different directions.
“I want to try something before I take you back, before I tell you what I know about what is waiting for us with this trial and what may or may not lie beyond it, I said as turned to my side and pulled my shirt over my head and went for the buckle on my pants.
I glanced up when I felt her emotion. It was full of shock, confusion, and a tinge of anticipation. I was sure I was blushing. Good. God. This woman was nothing less than intoxicating. Her lips were parted slightly, the glass panes of tears were gone, and her brow was raised just slightly.
She wasn’t afraid right now, and she surely wasn’t mad; she thought we were about to lose ourselves in a seductive embrace. The thought was tempting, very tempting, enough so that I had to command that my body did not react to that reques
t.
“We’re jumping,” I said with a nod to the cliff that was only a few feet away.
I felt fear spike in her, but I smiled anyway. I walked over to her and pulled her top shirt over her head, revealing a thin tank top, then dropped her jeans. “Adrenaline. It’s what most people use to fight fear.” I shrugged as my gaze bashfully glanced over her. I could see her heart pounding in her chest…it was just under that glistening flower that promised a connection we had not yet found.
“I don’t have a death wish, Chambers. I’m trying to find a way to avoid it,” she quipped.
She was driving me mad in the most amazing way. I’ve always felt too young to die. Too young for this to be the end. Standing here right now, staring at how perfectly the sun basked over her tan skin, I felt alive. I felt full of life.
Her gasp was the only thing that brought me crashing down to reality. She stepped forward, staring at my chest. I closed my eyes and swallowed a curse. I had learned to pretty much ignore the pain in my chest. It wasn’t as bad now that the dagger could clearly be seen. It was growing darker by the minute, and details that I hadn’t seen before and couldn’t even fathom were starting to show.
“What is this?” she asked, reaching for it. I held in the sigh I felt when she touched it and stilled my shocked expression when I saw the flower on her chest flash as if in recognition of my mark, when I saw a flash of blue wave across her eyes.
I clasped my hand over hers. “We are going to talk about this when we get back to Chara. Right now. Adrenaline,” I said as I picked her up and moved her to the cliff. I stopped short and set her down before me. There was only enough room for her tiptoes.
Down below, at least fifty feet, there was water. That water, which was deeper than it surely looked, spilled into another fall, then another. The stepping stones of giants, as Drake used to call them.
Her heart was hammering; I could feel it against my skin where my arm was bracing her. I felt that fear saturating her. I leaned her forward, only for her to flare out her hands. There it was. I felt adrenaline. The fear was absent for a brief second.