Chapter 10 #4
“Only this drink. Or else I’ll have to work twice as hard to keep you alive.”
The humor returned to her expression. “Keeping me alive, are you? Shouldn’t a ghost want me to join the other side?”
Thirty years without speaking, and then all at once, she was Love again.
It was my turn to look contemplative. I could tell my expression unnerved her, so I did my best to rein it in. “I wouldn’t mind your company,” I said honestly, “but it doesn’t work like that. Your death would only bring me pain.”
Ah, there it was. The wrong thing.
I knew I’d said too much before the words left my lips. The humor faded from her face as she set the mead-filled goblet on the flat stone upon which we sat. “What are you, then?”
Perhaps she was done drinking, but I wasn’t. I was glad for the cloud that reappeared to douse the thin moonlight as I spoke into my sip of mead. “No answer would satisfy you.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d said it to her, though it was the first time she’d heard it in this cycle.
“And what about me?” she asked. “I’m Caoimhe, by the way, though I suspect you’ve known my name for some time.
My luck turned the day I saw you on these shores.
My family has flourished. We’re the wealthiest in the village and haven’t had so much as a scrape in two years.
Would no answer satisfy me there, either?
” When I said nothing, she pressed, “Do tell, then, what answer would satisfy you?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
This was my Love. This was the soul that cut to the heart of things, who saw through my bullshit, who spoke her mind and advocated for herself and pierced the veil time and time again. This was the perceptive question that carved out the center of the apple and handed me its core.
The alcohol was nowhere near strong enough for me to be drunk, but my lowered inhibitions came from something.
Perhaps it was the reckless thought that if I fucked up this life, I’d do it better in the next.
I didn’t know. I thought of Brigid’s warning and desperately wished the knowledge would appear on my tongue.
But I looked deep into the eyes as emerald as the grass upon which she sat and said: “We’d both be happier and better off if I knew the answer to that question. ”
She chewed the inside of her cheek, considering.
I half expected her to ask about our first meeting.
I had a fleeting, wild fantasy wherein the night ended with her asking to leave her family and return with me to Hell. But instead, we settled into an odd, companionable silence. The small smiles she offered between her drinks almost carried the weight of pity, as if she felt sad for me.
I was reckless with Shala’s life.
Eleni would have joined me, if given the chance. She’d been stolen before I’d been able to ask.
Yuka knew better. She saw a greater vision, a bigger purpose, and chose to return to the earth as a human.
And what of Caoimhe? I’d never spoken her name—not to her, anyway.
Not on this side of the veil. I heard it on her son’s tongue—her Little Rabbit.
I heard it on her husband’s lips, though he wasn’t nearly as offensive of a presence as one might hope, given my desire to hate him.
The man was kind and cared for both his wife and child in all the ways a human should.
I heard her human name on the mouths of friends and villagers on more than one occasion.
But she hadn’t asked mine.
She gathered her things into her basket and readied herself to leave before the moon’s sliver dipped below the horizon. She fidgeted as if waiting for me to say something. Perhaps to ask her a favor. To request something. To beg her to stay.
“If I may…...” I started.
She looked at me expectantly.
“Why ‘rabbit’?”
The question caught her off guard. Her nose wrinkled, head shaking as if it were the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. “Is there a man born without a love for rabbits?” she laughed, tossing her hair back. “He may as well reject the stars.”
We were Eros and Psyche once more, and Cupid’s arrow pierced my heart.
To her, the words had meant nothing.
Obvious, unimportant, as common as breathing.
But Yuka had been right. Her mortal heart didn’t possess the conscious thought of an immortal, but it tucked away things time and time again like a treasure hunt for only her and me.
I snatched the diamond of her words and held it breathlessly against my chest as she walked away, a woman in wool abandoning her phantom in the moonlight.
Stars.
We wouldn’t be lovers. Not in this life. I wasn’t her savior. I wasn’t her spirit guide. But I held tight from my place behind the shadows, noting every time she poured a glass of mead and left it on the windowsill, knowing it was for me.
Spring flowers, summer heat, autumnal leaves, and winter’s snow came and went.
Every year on her birthday, she would return to the riverbank, and we would share a drink.
She kept her health and fortune and was too clever to ask how or why she’d been chosen.
Her words were a careful dance, and one I respected.
Her message was clear: her obligation was to her child, and for him, she could love or serve no other.
“You’d never serve me,” I’d chided quietly.
She’d smiled. “Then, you’d be a step up from motherhood.”
I fought the answering smile. She was not born to be a mother, rather, became one as a product of her time and culture, and excelled within it. Perhaps she would not have chosen to give birth if her paths had been laid before her, but her Little Rabbit was here, nonetheless.
And while I could count my days with her on two hands, I learned as much about her story and mine as I had in every cycle before.
Brigid was right.
We had not been thrust together to learn a lesson.
We were history in the making.