Epilogue
Outside, she could hear Anaya and Frank chasing each other around. Or maybe it was Jyoti and Will—they hadn’t fully settled
on who they wanted to be yet. People from the past, people from the now, some combination of both. “They’ll figure it out,”
Bram said, as he listened to the sound of delighted love coming in through their bedroom window.
The bedroom in the summer house beneath the stairs, where they made their own. “Draw,” he said, and instead of snakes and
spiders and knives through the heart, whoever won filled the other’s head with lines from stories they had once loved. That
they still loved. I am all in a sea of wonders, he sent to her. I am longing to be with you and build our castles in the air, she sent to him.
They built them.
In Calabaraia. In this world.
In the home they made within each other.
“You know I meant you, don’t you, when we danced. That when I said I wanted to return somewhere desperately, it was to you,”
he said in between kisses to her throat, the side of her face, into her hair. But he didn’t need to hear her answer. Desire
made her magic bloom so deeply she drifted above him.
And love made his so intense she didn’t even need his touch.
The pleasure he wanted her to feel was already thrumming through her body, filling her senses.
“I thought you were so powerful, so much a master of the emotion that makes your magic,” she said, as she let it take her.
“But really it was just a shadow of what you can do when it consumes you,” she said, and he replied as she lost herself to bliss.
“I am at my very best when I have you by my side, when I can see you happy, when I can give, give, give,” he said, and oh,
she gave right back.