Chapter 31
“Light,” I whisper to the star-speckled sky. The way the moon is glowing down on us feels like approval. Like we have its blessing.
“Excuse me,” says the man lying in the grass beside me. His sandy-blond hair falls back into the grass. His eyes, previously fixed on the sky above, now stare at me with even more abundant wonder.
“Light. It’s what my name means.”
“Your real name?” He rolls onto his belly, propping himself on his forearms, his fingers intertwined as he links his hands together. “And what do I get if I guess your name correctly?”
I roll onto my side to face him, the satisfaction in me rising.
“Hmm,” I say teasingly.
“Hmm,” he replies, flopping back onto his back and staring at the sky. “Light, you say. Do I get to know what language it is?”
I smile, pressing my lips together.
“Aurora,” he guesses, still staring up at the sky.
I shake my head. “No, but that’s a prettier one.”
“I doubt that,” he says, and something in my belly flutters.
“Well, that’s too bad. Because that’s the only name I know that means light.” There’s something odd about the way he says it. Something I can’t place.
I consider telling him. But there’s a part of me that longs to keep whatever this is between us locked away in this moment. So that when I’m gone, I’ll remain in his memory as I am in this moment. A mystery he wants to unravel. A dream he longs to interpret.
That’s what I’ll be soon.
A dream.
The truth is on the tip of my tongue. I visited the healer again today. The bleeding I’ve suffered over the past few months has only worsened. He says I have a few weeks left at best. And that’s him being generous.
A chill of fear moves through me. I’m less terrified of dying than I am of dying alone.
Not telling him my name—well, it had begun as a flirtation.
And then it grew into a secret joke we shared.
But now I’m dying, and he doesn’t know my name.
And suddenly that feels important—a grave mistake, and I’m wondering why a man would bother to stay and watch the death of a woman whose name he doesn’t even know.
“When are you ever going to trust me, my love?” he asks, his voice suddenly quiet. “When are you going to tell me your name? Have I not earned at least that?”
Trust. If that’s what he wants, it won’t be my name that fulfills that desire.
“I’m dying,” I say.
He blinks, and I find I’m surprised as he is. We both lie there for a moment under the assumption that we must have heard wrong.
But I’ve wanted to trust this man since the moment I laid eyes on him. And now that the truth is out there, I can’t seem to stop myself.
“I’m dying.” This time it’s less a whisper and more an easy admission, as if I’m accusing my body itself.
“Dying?” he echoes. He lays the word out slowly, as if reminding himself how to sound it out. “What of?”
“The physician’s not sure,” I say. Unable to look at him, I stare at the sky. “But he says I only have a few weeks.”
The man next to me goes still. Quiet.
His silence is unbearable, so I say, “I just found out today—that I’m dying, I mean. I’ve known for months, of course, that something was wrong.”
“You should have told me,” he says, his voice clipped.
I turn back toward him, surprised to find anger on his face. Not just surprised at him—surprised at myself for expecting anything different.
“I know,” I say. “But I just wanted…” I trail off, because I don’t know what I wanted.
I wanted, this entire time, to have someone who would cry over me.
But I feared that if I told him, he would leave.
And now that we’re close enough that I’m fairly sure he won’t, well, it seems silly to have kept it from him.
Except there’s that anger again, burning in his eyes.
“I should have told you, I know,” I say. “It wasn’t fair of me.” I trail off, because he’s not looking at me anymore, but at the sky.
“You’re sure you only have a few weeks?”
“The healer said that was a generous estimate.”
This time, when he looks at me, the anger is gone, replaced by something more desperate. He rolls toward me and cups the back of my neck with his hand, using it to pull me into him. When he brushes a kiss to my lips, it fills me up.
He’s going to stay. He’s going to stay these next few weeks.
He presses another kiss to my lips.
And his fingers to my throat.