Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Maybe it’s her touch, or the trace of fear threading her voice, but he rouses quickly. His eyes follow her gaze to the red stain smeared over the white sheets. Anna feels him stiffen beside her, his eyes wild with the same fears—the same questions—as her own.
She goes to the bathroom to wash. Once she’s cleaned up, she drapes a blanket over her shoulders and sits on the back porch step.
She looks out over the garden, at the willowy trunk of a once magnificent tree.
Despite the layer of winter frost, its leaves still shine with bright new growth. Unbothered by the cold.
Khiran sits beside her, pushing a hot mug into her hands. “Drink.”
Anna doesn’t ask what it is. She’s brewed enough menstrual tea for others to recognize the scent.
She brings the steaming rim to her lips, taking a cautious sip.
He’s added honey to mask the bitterness.
The ring of bone on her left hand clinks against the ceramic when she adjusts her hold.
The warmth against her palms helps thaw the tension in her chest. “Do you—we’ve never talked about children.
” They’ve never had to. It was never within the realm of possibility.
He sits beside her, their shoulders brushing. “What do you wish?”
Turning to him, she studies his profile. If she follows his gaze, she knows it will lead her to the very same tree her own just left. “I asked you first.” She means for the words to be teasing, but they twist at the last second. The weak joke souring until it sounds more like a plea.
His sigh is heavy, curling from his lips like smoke, but there’s a shadow of a smile hinting at the corner of his mouth. “You didn’t ask anything. Even if you did, it wouldn’t matter.” He meets her eyes, flecks of amber warm despite the chill. “My answer is dependent on your own.”
Her heart aches. “Don’t do that. Don’t put it all on me. That’s not fair.”
Khiran hesitates, studying her as he measures his response. “It’s not something I ever considered—it has never been a possibility before today,” he admits. “You’ve raised children, Anna. You understand the weight of this decision, what it would mean for us, in ways I can’t even fathom.”
Anna understands—she does—but that isn’t what she’s asking.
“Consider it now,” she urges, lacing her fingers with his and squeezing.
His hand feels cold against her scarred flesh.
His skin is always cold, now. “This isn’t a decision we need to make today, but it’s something we need to talk about.
I just—I want to know where you stand. Right now, in this moment.
I just want to know how you’re feeling—”
“Terrified,” he says, the murmured word silencing her as effectively as a shout. Around her fingers, his hand tightens. “I feel terrified.”
She swallows, mouth dry. “Why?”
There are ghosts casting shadows in his eyes. “Because you’re mortal.”
He doesn’t elaborate, but Anna doesn’t need him to.
Medicine has come so far, the mortality rate for pregnancy improved so much, but there’s always that chance that something could go wrong.
The odds would feel small to anyone else, but she has spent so many centuries being untouchable that even the smallest of risks feels colossal.
She knows he feels it, too.
Khiran leans into her, forehead resting against her own.
“There was a time when you wanted this, when you mourned the family you could never have,” he says, and Anna knows he’s thinking of their conversation on a grassy knoll overlooking a battlefield—the one where she grieved for the future dreamed up by another man.
A future that was out of her reach. “How could I possibly live with myself if I denied you this chance? If I let my fear of being left behind strip you of the happiness you once wished for?”
She frowns, an uncomfortable truth tightening her chest. “It’s been a long time since I wished for that, Khiran.”
“Yes,” he agrees, cold fingers tracing her brow before his palm cups her cheek. “That doesn’t mean it’s dead.”
No, it doesn’t.
Regrets are stubborn things. They sink their teeth and hold on even as other hopes and other dreams slip through her fingers. But that’s all it is now, Anna realizes. A regret. A wish that soured, because she was robbed of the chance to choose.
“I’m not sure I want that anymore,” she tells him.
There’s a twisting sensation in her chest, and she realizes that her words aren’t entirely true.
She shakes her head, hand curling over her heart just so she can take comfort in its steady beating beneath her palm.
“No… I don’t want that. It’s an old dream, one leftover from who I was—who I wanted to be—before. I’m not that person anymore.”
His stare is so weighted, so searching, she feels pinned by it. “You don’t need to be certain, Anna. We may no longer have forever, but we still have time.”
She knows, but it still doesn’t change the answer she feels in her heart.
Weeks pass, a blur of little moments that build until they feel like something bigger.
The things she once loved—the slow, simple life she once craved—suddenly chafes. Time is moving differently, now. There is an hourglass in her mind, sand spilling through her fingers faster than she can catch it, reminding her that she no longer has forever.
Before, time felt like wading in cool, still waters, but now she’s being swept away by the current—forced to swim with the tide or drown fighting it.
“You seem restless,” Jiro tells her, a question disguised as an observation.
He drives her into town every other Saturday to run errands and deliver the occasional letter.
He’d been kind enough to let her use his home address for corresponding with Silas and the others.
There are no letters today, but the rolled paper bag from the pharmacy crinkles on her lap as her grip tightens—pills rattling as he stops at a red light.
It still feels strange, the way their relationship has shifted.
He’s no longer a boy looking to her for support, but a grown man—a father—trying to give it to her.
In her mind, the sand spills a little faster.
“I’m…” she trails off, searching for the word to describe the anxiety pacing within the hollow walls of her chest like an animal.
The kind that knows when something is coming because instinct tells them to be afraid but not what to do. “Adjusting.”
Jiro glances from her, to the bag on her lap, and back to the road as the light turns green.
He releases the brake and steps on the gas.
“I didn’t think there would be much to adjust to,” he admits, more curious than unkind.
“The life you’re living isn’t all that different from the one we lived together, is it? ”
She hesitates, but the silence that falls between them is patient enough to coax an honest answer.
Looking out the window, she admires the way ordinary people walk along the sidewalks, unburdened by the weight of knowing how short their lives really are.
“It’s been seven hundred and ninety one years since I’ve been mortal,” she says, the words leaving her like a confession.
“I’ve lived more lifetimes than any one person should.
I should feel satisfied—at peace—with however much time I have left. ”
She looks to him, her brow furrowed. “So why doesn’t it feel like enough?”
Jiro is quiet, glancing between her and the road as he pulls over and parks the car. The sound of the engine fills the silence until he releases a heavy sigh and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
There’s an edge of regret in his stare that tells her he wishes he did.
Anna closes her eyes, gathers her resolve, and forces herself to smile.
“I don’t think I expected you to. I just—sometimes feelings are easier to navigate when they’re put into words.
” She shrugs, dropping her gaze. “Maybe I’ve been immune to death for so long, I’ve forgotten how vulnerable it feels to be powerless against it. ”
“You still have a long life ahead of you, Anna.”
“Maybe,” she says, her expression softening. “Maybe not. That’s always been part of it, after all. The not knowing.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.” Jiro’s fingers drum against the leather of the steering wheel. “Those pills… they’re for Khiran, aren’t they?”
Her chest tightens, heart squeezing painfully. Aside from her prescription of birth control, everything in the bag is over the counter pain medication.
“It’s the cold,” she murmurs. “The weather has been hard on him.”
It’s an understatement. Khiran moves around the house with a stiffness, his thin body shivering and his joints aching.
She knows he’s been struggling to sleep—can feel the way he turns in the night as if searching for a reprieve.
Some mornings, he doesn’t get out of bed until the sun sits high in the sky.
Some days, he hardly leaves the bed at all.
He’ll lay, burrowed in their blankets, and drift between sleep and a level of glazed detachment that scares her.
Her heart gives a hollow ache, the paper bag crinkling in her hands. “I’ve been giving him what I can from the garden, but most days it doesn’t seem to be enough.”
She hates seeing him in pain. Hates that there’s so little she can do to ease it.
Jiro frowns, rotating the wheel and taking a right turn onto the freeway on-ramp. “Ami mentioned he’s been hurting.”
The family of three drive up to the cottage every few weeks to visit.
Sometimes they would stay the entire day, and Jiro and his wife Jenny would help her in the garden (Anna has learned that it is her touch that was responsible for it thriving while she was gone).
Other times they stay only long enough to share a meal and a bit of conversation.
Ami, their five year old, had taken an immediate liking to Khiran.
Wherever he went, she followed as faithful as a shadow.