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“Tell me, Freya,” I murmur, turning to lift her chin, bringing her eyes to mine. I can see the sadness and fear in them. She’s worried. “You don’t have to hide from me,” I say quietly but insistently, watching her closely. “Not now.”
She glances up at me, looking lost and vulnerable in a way I’ve never seen before. For a long moment, she just stares at me, like she’s trying to decide if she should trust me with whatever is weighing her down.
“I have Huntington’s disease,” she finally says, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s genetic. My father and my brother had it, and I have it too. It means I’m going to die young.”
Her words hit me like a punch to the gut, stunning me with their sheer weight and finality. I stare at her, my throat tight, a fury I don’t understand roaring in my veins as I try to process what she’s just told me.
“The neurons in my brain… They’ll start to break down and die at some point. Some people live until their fifties, but mine, like my father’s, is going to progress a lot faster than that. It’ll probably first hit me in a few years. And then, it will kill me.”
My throat closes off. My pulse claws through my veins like grit, slowing down until all I know is the sheer unfairness of it.
Something inside me breaks. My arms wrap tighter around her, holding her close against my chest as if I can protect her from the inevitable. She’s shaking, her breath coming in short, uneven gasps, and I can feel her tears soaking into my shirt.
“I didn’t want you to know I was going to die,” she blurts, her voice muffled against my chest. “I didn’t want you to look at me differently. I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me or pity me.”
There’s a long silence.
Then I shake my head, my thumb brushing gently across her cheek. “We’re all going to die,” I say quietly. My eyes and my fingers trail down her side, until my thumb brushes over the tattoo on her ribs.
“That’s why you got this, isn’t it?” I trace the pad of my thumb over her tattoo. “Remember that you must die.”
She nods, her lips quivering.
“Well, you told me yourself that there’s another half to that saying,” I say fiercely, my voice quiet but firm. “MementoVivere. Remember tolive.”
She looks up at me, her breath catching in her throat.
“Live, Freya,” I hiss darkly, holding her face tightly in my hands, our eyes locked. “We live forright fucking now. For today. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday. Just…now.”
Her arms wrap around me, pulling me closer as our lips crush together, the fire crackling beside us.
I’ve been fighting my whole life. I know I can’t fight death, or the inevitable.
But that sure as fuck isn’t going to stop me from trying.
36
FREYA
The driveback to Kyoto is long, but I don’t mind. The windows are down, and the post-storm night air whips through my hair as Mal navigates the twisting mountain roads with an ease that leaves me both comforted and exhilarated.
The storm is over, but there’s a quiet aftermath in my chest that lingers. Mal and I sat by that fire for another two hours, just talking and spilling all our secrets to each other, the heat of our confessions burning away the last vestiges of the walls I’d built so carefully around myself.
I grin in the dark silence when I feel Mal’s hand reach over to take mine. He doesn’t say a word, and I just let myself sink into this feeling, loving the way his touch grounds me and makes everything else fade away.
But there’s also a restless energy I’ve been feeling since we were out on the water, surfing before the storm. Something throbbing just beneath the surface, urging me to move, todosomething.
“I’m not ready to go back,” I whisper.
Mal’s brow arches as he glances at me. “We don’t have to.”
I turn to face him, my eyes searching his. “I want to do something reckless,” I say, the words tumbling out before I can stop them. “Something wild. I need to feel alive.”
“I know a place.”
We bypass the Mori house,and instead drive down into the city itself, to the Higashiyama district. The buildings around us grow older, their traditional wooden facades casting long shadows over the narrow streets. We wind through the maze of Kyoto’s back alleys, the sounds of the city turning quiet, as if we’ve gone back in time.
Finally, Mal pulls up outside a small, unassuming building with a traditionalkirizumagabled roof, a small fountain, and a garden beside the few steps up to the side door.
