Page 39 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

Silene glanced at the people a small distance away from them running around with strings tied to kites carried by wind so high they were about to disappear between clouds. It wasn’t the only thing she noticed. So many eyes were in their direction, but they were not on her. Everyone was looking at the God laying down beside her with his hands under his head and his eyes closed, his black shirt pulled up to reveal a sliver of skin on his stomach that was covered in tattoos like the rest of his limbs were. “Finally see something you like?” he asked, smirking.

“Women and men look at you like they want to have you.”

He flashed her a wolfish grin. “Who would not?”

“I’ve watched humans complain enough to know that arrogant men are always lousy lovers.”

“Perhaps.”

She was stunned at his admission. “Perhaps?”

“It has been so long.”

“Since what?” she asked, grabbing another strawberry.

“Since I’ve been anyone's lover. Five hundred and something years to be exact.”

Silene stopped chewing her strawberry, the sweet fruit suddenly tasting sour against her tongue.

Taking advantage of her distraction, he sat up and leaned in to bite the rest of the strawberry she was holding between her fingers, his lips almost grazing her skin. “Celibacy has not been half as bad,” he said, licking his lip and standing there, his face merely inches away from her. “First the object of my desires tends to hide from me. I can say it with full confidence that it hasn’t been much of a struggle. Especially when I spent half of that time imagining her to be in love with my brother and the other half of it contemplating what I could give to be able to just touch her.”

Silene swallowed, the world around her suddenly starting to spin too fast, so fast that she grew dizzy. “Don’t speak.”

“Forbid me.”

“Gabriel—”

“Have I told you,” he said, moving her billowing hair out of her face with the gentility of the wind. “How much I love how you say my name? Like you wish to gut me and eat me alive. I’d let you feast on every single bone. Pull me apart however you’d like.”

“Why? You never tell me why? Why won’t you tell me anything at all?”

“You would not understand. You never would understand if I told you how my soul has been forever tied to yours in ways no soul should ever be tied to another’s,” he said, his eyes dropping at her mouth. “For a while I could not understand myself. I couldn’t understand anything at all. I had to make peace with the fact that I’d be longing for you forever before I even knew why.”

She whispered, “That does not sound nice at all.”

“If I could steal anything—anything at all,” he breathed, “I’d steal just a kiss from your lips.”

Harsh wind swept across the hill as she sucked in a breath before saying, “I would have given it to you.”

Slowly, his head lowered and his eyes drew shut, as did hers, for there was finality in their fates—a finality she still did not entirely understand.

Why would they both be sentenced to such a fate? What had they ever done to deserve it?

He walked beside her as they retreated back to his car close to the day’s near end, the doomed two feet space between them somehow growing vast, deeper than any canyon or river or sea. The longer she remained there, just two feet from him, the further she felt from him.

So Silene inched closer and closer with each step they took, and unlike the many other times when that space between them had been breached, she didn’t feel weak at all. If anything, Silene felt unbeatable. Perhaps it is why she did what she did next.

Her pinkie brushed his, and she heard him suck a sharp breath. “Silene—”

Before he could even finish saying her name, she slid her hand against his, linking their fingers together. She only felt him for a fraction of a second before her entire body was possessed by pain. Tears clung to her eyelids as it raked through each muscle, bone and sinew, carving its path deep inside the very core of her soul.

She still wouldn’t have let go of him if he had not let go of her, backing away again to restore that wretched invisible isthmus between them.

He stared at her hand that had turned a rotten shade and almost gnawed to the bone. Terror changed the very blue of his eyes into an almost deep, dark sapphire. “Silene,” he breathed, stricken with panic.

“It will go back to being fine when I return to Asphodel,” she reassured him, pulling her lace scarf off and wrapping it against her unfeeling limb. “What would a ghost like me even need their hand for anyway?” She looked up at him just as a tear made its way down her cheek. “What’s the point of even having one if I can’t hold what I want to hold?”

Wind picked up, carrying his hair away from his brow and removing shade from the blue irises that had turned turbulent.