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“And I remember being so torn,” she continued. “Split between never wanting you to stop reading and wishing you’d shut up and kiss me.” Isobel allowed herself a small laugh. “I think it must have been on your mind too.”
He didn’t speak, but he turned his head toward her again.
Isobel tightened her grip on his hand, and her own went numb from the connection.
“Sometimes . . .” Isobel paused, then started again. “At least once every hour of every day . . . I find myself wondering how things might have been if . . . if your parents hadn’t come home early. If we had kissed then. Do you ever wonder the same thing? If any of this would have turned out differently?”
A beat passed in which he said nothing. Then, suddenly, Varen’s hand tightened around hers. “Read me something?” he said. The sound of his voice, the question itself, startled her.
Isobel’s eyes fell to the pages open in front of her as, slowly, the white space began to fill. She scanned the text as it formed, recognizing the poem by its title as one of Poe’s.
She remembered Varen mentioning this piece several times, though she’d never once read it. This had to mean two things: that Varen knew at least a portion of it by heart, and that he was the one making it appear.
Drawing a shaking breath, Isobel did the only thing she could do. She began to read out loud. To him.
“It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;—”
Varen clenched her hand tighter, but she didn’t look up and she didn’t stop reading.
“And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.”
Isobel stopped there. Because that was where the words dissipated.
She frowned, feeling the thump of her heart grow heavy while she waited. The right-hand page remained bare. Could it be that was all he recalled of the poem?
Then Varen spoke, picking up the lines from the memory that hadn’t failed him, after all.
“But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
