Chapter Twenty-Four #3
I would love to spend my life with Theo, she thought painfully. But I also know that wouldn’t be right.
She took a deep breath, shaking her head, regret crossing her features.
“No, Theo,” she said gently. “That’s not how this ends.
You know that.” Her voice softened, but didn’t waver.
She sighed, pulling her tarot cards out from the drawer in which they were kept and unwrapping them from their wrapping of cloth gently.
She fanned them across the countertop. “Please choose a card. Please.”
Theo didn’t answer her right away. Instead, he stepped forward, the movement slow and deliberate, like he was giving her time to stop him if she wanted to.
Augustine didn’t move. She felt frozen in place, her breath catching somewhere between her ribs as he closed the last bit of distance between them.
He lifted a hand, hesitating just short of her face. “Can I?” he asked, the question soft and careful.
Augustine nodded, unable to trust her voice.
His fingers brushed her cheek, light at first, like he was testing whether she was really there.
Then firmer, warmer. He traced the curve of her face with a kind of quiet focus that made her skin tingle, his thumb grazing her cheekbone, fingertips sliding along her jaw, mapping the line of her chin.
“I wanted to touch you,” he whispered. “I wondered what you felt like.”
“And?” she asked, her voice wavering slightly.
“And you’re worth waiting for.”
His fingers resumed their exploration, but it wasn’t hurried.
It wasn’t uncertain. It was knowing, and that was what startled her most, because Theo moved like someone who already understood her face, like this wasn’t discovery, but recognition.
Like he was remembering her, rather than learning her.
His thumb paused at her lower lip, and Augustine’s breath hitched.
Theo’s gaze flicked between her eyes and her mouth, something unspoken passing through him. Then he leaned in, slowly enough that Augustine could feel the warmth of him, could anticipate what was to come before it happened. And then . . . and then his lips brushed hers.
The kiss was almost unbearably soft. So barely there that she wondered if she felt it at all, more of a question than a claim.
She’d kissed him before. Those kisses hadn’t been hers, though. No, they’d belonged to someone else, borrowed from another life. But this kiss? This kiss was different. This kiss was hers, and hers alone.
Augustine hadn’t even been certain she could kiss him, hadn’t known whether the same universe which allowed him to exist beside her would also allow her to touch him in such a way.
Now, she had her answer, and she couldn’t help herself from tilting her face further towards his, wanting nothing more than to deepen this new touch between them.
At the same time, Theo’s hand slipped from her face, drifting downward — not breaking the closeness, just shifting — and he pointed, almost absently, towards the spread of cards beside them.
She followed the line of his gesture with her eyes. “The Two of Cups,” she whispered, into his lips.
The card lay between the others, unmistakable now that she was looking at it. Two figures, facing one another, offering something shared, something chosen. It wasn’t fate, and not inevitable, but something found and then chosen.
Of course it would be that one.
The card suddenly shimmered, and at first, Augustine thought it was just the candlelight catching the lacquered surface. But then, the figures on the Two of Cups shifted. They moved.
The tiny painted hands lifted, the cups tilting towards one another, mid-toast. The air between them seemed to ripple, something unseen passing from one to the other — something alive.
Her breath stilled as she tried to speak. “Theo—”
The room was already slipping, though, the walls of her shop wavering, the edges of shelves and shadows softening, dissolving like ink in water. The familiar weight of the space began to tilt, gravity loosening its hold.
And yet still — still — she could feel him, his lips still on hers, his breath warm on her cheek.
Augustine clung to him instinctively, her fingers curling slightly as if she could hold onto him through that single point of contact. The rest of the world unravelled, sound stretching thin, light bending into nothing, but Theo stayed, warm and real.
For one impossible, suspended moment, it felt like she was being pulled in two directions at once, backward into something already lived, and forward into something she hadn’t yet dared to name.
The card flared brighter, and the figures on it stepped closer, the space between them vanishing as Augustine’s world dropped away.
Augustine gasped softly against Theo’s mouth as the pull finally took her, the shop disappearing completely.
But even as the past closed around her, even as everything else changed, she could still feel the echo of him, and it was like a promise.
Like a thread she knew she could follow back.
And then she opened her eyes, and—