“You okay?” Julian asks, turning me to face him. The look I give him must be withering, because he tugs me into his arms. “I know. Stupid question.”
I burrow into his chest, searching for the comfort of his many elusive fragrances. But there are no notes of pink pepper or sandalwood or ylang-ylang today, only the smell of laundry detergent and the subtle sharpness of his sweat, and instead of comfort I’m taken by unease. Julian is warm and firm and his heart is racing and he hasjust killed a man in cold blood for me. A man who might have lived many more years, cooking venison stew in a big pot to share with his neighbors, if he’d never happened upon Julian’s now infant sister.
“We’ll wait outside,” Rose says quietly.
Julian doesn’t let go of me, just digs into his pocket for keys that he hands over to his sister.
“Not the RV,” he says cryptically, but she seems to understand, because she takes the keys, nods, and heads out the door.
Just like that, we are alone.
“You’re hurt,” Julian says, in the creaking quiet of the cabin. He trails gentle fingers over the welt on my head, the split in my lip, the bruise I know is blossoming on my chin. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
I hum and lean into his palm. It smells bitter and metallic, like burnt chocolate. Like gunfire. My chest throbs as I study his face and remember the first time I saw it. How my jaw quite literally dropped. And to think I had hardly known him then, hadn’t explored the depths of his endless mind, hadn’t felt the fervor of his love. My favorite thing about him, I realize, is his honesty—ironic, since his lies are what led us here. But hisactions, they have never failed to tell the truth. I believe that he loves me. I believe that he would fight for me. I believe that he would give himself up for me, for Claire.
There, I realize, lies the problem.
“Sean.” His voice deepens with worry. “Talk to me.”
Instead I pull him into a kiss. It tastes like iron and salt, like an hours-long drive around a mountain at twenty miles per hour above the speed limit and a panicked sprint to an unlocked back door. It feels like longing and desperation and a hundred nights we should have had together that we spent apart because he’d hoped to scrub me off hisskin. Julian’s arm around my waist is tight, the press of his chest into mine so firm that it feels like he’s trying to lock us together. I wind my arms around his neck, kiss him hard, kiss him mad. A last supper, so much more sumptuous than Leila could have planned.
When we break apart, we’re both panting, and Julian’s eyes shine with veneration, like I am his redemption descending from the skies, and it’s that look that tells me that I’m about to do the right thing.
“I can’t be with you,” I tell him gently. “Not now, at least.”
It is a terrible thing, to watch a person’s heart break. I can see the moment when Julian’s daze becomes alertness, when he goes from hearing my words to processing them to understanding their repercussions. There is a future he’s created in his mind, one where he carries me bridal style into a world we build together, that I’ve just dashed away.
“What do you mean?” he says, his voice jagged.
I gesture to the dead man on the ground, in the direction of the door where the other halves of my heart escaped with the Ghoshal siblings.
“This,” I say. “I’ve dedicated my life to giving people as much life as they can grasp. I can’t be okay with taking it away.”
He holds my hands tight between his.
“But I’ll stop,” he pleads. “Ihavestopped, Sean, for you—”
“I don’t just mean other people’s, Jules,” I say. “I mean yours. I can’t have you sacrifice your life forme. It needs to be foryou.”
Julian gapes. I watch as tears spring to his eyes, and he whips his head away to keep them from my view.
“I don’t understand,” he says.
I nudge him back, make his eyes meet mine so that he can see the truth in what I say next.
“I love you,” I tell him definitively. “I’ll probably never stop loving you. But I can’t be your source of meaning. You can’t decide to live this way because you want to be by my side. Because I’m not like you, Julian. I’m fully, totally mortal. I’m fragile, and fickle, and totally fallible. What if I have a heart attack one day and die? What if I fall out of love and leave you? What if you slip up, or Rose slips up, or Leila accidentally enchants someone because she is young now and uninhibited and neither of you has ever raised a child before, and someone comes after my family again to get to yours?” I imagine Claire, who was apparently so much like me. How would she have felt, knowing how much wreckage the love of her life had wrought in the wake of her demise? How many lives were lost or shortened in her name? “Tell me the truth. If you were too late. If I was already gone. Would you have still abstained? Or would you have been lost again?”
“But I wasn’t too late,” Julian says stubbornly. “We don’t have to deal with hypotheticals. We can do this like you said. Choose each other every day and go from there.”
But I’m shaking my head.
“You don’t know what you’re choosing, Jules. Pain, suffering, loss…those come in the package. You get in a car accident tomorrow? You’ll have to spend months, maybe years, healing. Maybe live the rest of your life with a back that never stops aching and a neck that’s always tight. You catch the flu? You tough it out. You can’t heal your wounds with a kiss in the dark with a stranger who won’t miss what they’ve lost. It has to all be worth it for you, whether I’m with you or not.”
It’s a life that Julian has never known and one he can’t promise to me without experiencing it first. One I won’t force upon him out of my own principles, because I will not have this stunning, powerfulbeing be anyone other than who he truly wants to be. If I didn’t want to sob, I might laugh out loud, because the logic is eerily similar to why I didn’t want to date him when I thought the biggest barrier was his comparative youth.
Under my hand, Julian’s jaw wobbles. A tear creeps from the corner of his right eye, drips down, and settles into the crevice of my palm.
“This…hurts,” he manages. He grips his own shirt, like he’s about to tear his heart out.