I already would have been too late.
Rage tightened my chest, and I struggled to draw her close, to erase all distance.
Every mistake.
Every wound that had been inflicted.
“Tell me what happened while I was gone.”
When the only objective I’d had was finding my way back to her, when I’d found her, and in one moment, my world had been decimated.
“I hate you, Logan Lawson, and I don’t want to ever see you again.”
Her fingers sank beyond my shirt, burrowing into soul and flesh. “I can’t.”
My arms wrapped around her. Tight. Like I could forever lock her to me.
Aster whimpered, pressed her face to my shirt, and exhaled. A ragged breath of surrender.
Moonlight streamed into the bedroom.
My little, fallen star.
One that’d burned out.
Slipped through my fingers.
I swayed her, danced with the girl that used to be mine.
Thirty days.
We stayed like that, in the silence for the longest time, before I whispered, “Was it real?”
She pressed her lips to my sternum, like it was her spirit’s way to my thrashing heart. “It was the only real thing I’ve ever known.”
So, I held her the way I used to do. Under the cover of night. In a place where no one knew.
She let me as our souls shifted.
As we sank deeper.
Against my chest and under my skin.
As a promise changed.
Time passed, minutes, hours, I didn’t know. But Aster sagged, and she let me hold her weight.
Her burden.
She drifted, like for the first time in years, her trouble had gone light.
So, I took it.
I swept her from her feet and into my arms. She sighed as she curled hers around my neck, and I carried her out into the sleeping house and into her room where I laid her in the center of her bed.
Agate eyes fluttered open. A murmuring of affection. A haunting of old hope. It was dimmed by the years of cruelty that had separated us.
She stretched out her hand. “Stay.”