“I did,” I whisper.
He clutches my face, searches it with an openness that turns him young.
“You love me too, right?” he asks. “It isn’t just me?”
I haven’t realized until he asks that I haven’t said it back, and that this Julian is not too proud to seek reassurance.
“I love you too,” I tell him truthfully. “But I’m scared.”
“Of me,” he says, knowing.
“Yes,” I confess.
He gathers me into his arms and I gasp; his counterpart has pushed into mine, and I can feel the sensation like a distant, blissful fullness. The Julian before me tenses, squeezes his eyes shut, and I know that he’s feeling what I’m feeling, fighting the base instincts that tell him to augment his gratification the way he knows best, the way he always has.
“Your life is yours, and mine too,” he says. “Just. Stay here with me like this?”
We hold each other close, breathing in tandem, hands curled together as the versions of us made of flesh tangle, and this Julian of my dreams does not once demand his sacrifice.
We wake up the next morning in a mess of sheets and limbs. White light streams in through between the crack of Julian’s curtains, and I roll in his arms, knowing that I’ll meet his gaze when I turn. He’s watching me carefully, like I’m a skittish cat he’s worried he’ll scare away. I sense, implicitly, that what he’s searching for in my face is regret.
I rub a thumb into the furrow of his brow, feel his whole body relax under one touch. The morning light outlines him in white like a fallen angel. He takes my hand, kisses my palm, my fingers, the ridge of my knuckles.
“You need to tell me what your plan is,” I say softly. “How you intend to get me back home. Because I’m not staying here forever.”
I don’t know what kind of life Mary led before she met Alphonse, but as idyllic as the quiet, secluded life that was laid out in their photo albums appeared, it is not one I aspire to. I want to savor everylast minute that I have left with my aging dog. I want my stressful, fulfilling, bloody job, cock-blocking pager and all. I want to take my goddaughter for ice cream to talk about her crushes and check off more countries on the travel list with Winona. And I want Brandon to survive long enough to see his daughter go to prom.
I want Julian too. Every inch of my soul swiveled in his direction when he left, every thought either engineered to avoid thinking of him or consumed by questions of “what if,” “where,” “why” that I couldn’t let go until I ended up at his side again. I want to be with him more than I’ve wanted anyone, and I’ve stopped caring whether it’s because of some supernatural hold he has over me or because he sees me so completely.
But not at the expense of the life I’ve worked so hard to build. Not at the expense ofme.
“I’m working something out with Ritika,” Julian says, pensive. “Leila doesn’t have the assets I do. Her income has mostly consisted of funds she’s inherited from her victims. She never really held an interest in investing like I did, and she doesn’t have Rose’s art to funnel funds into. Because she avoids aging, she can’t easily pretend to be her own descendant, and her protectiveness over her identity has meant that she doesn’t have a clear agent for an estate. Given that she’ll need to relocate soon, I—” He clams up abruptly, and I sit up, alarmed by his sudden reticence when we have been so open.
“Relocate?” I ask. “Why would she need to relocate?”
Julian doesn’t respond. He’s squinting into the distance, his lips curled against his teeth as if to keep his words from escaping.
We steep in an uncomfortable silence, stuck at an impasse until I finally step boldly over the line. I surprise myself by not being angry, only resolute. I have nothing to lose here anymore.
“I have spent the last six months thinking that I was losing mymind because of secrets you withheld,” I remind him. “If you and I are going to work, you can’t hide anything from me. Not anymore.”
The old home’s radiators groan awake, adding a howling gravity to my words.And if I find out you have, I hope he hears,I will leave you.
I can see him processing—or perhaps more accurately, stewing on—my words. He doesn’t want to tell me this part, but I take the gamble that he wants to lose me less, and win. Julian rolls, with a sigh, onto his back.
“Brandon’s dying quicker than Leila thought he would,” he admits. “His diagnosis threw her for a loop. I don’t know whether he’s still alive or not right now, but I imagine that it’s not long before she finishes with him and prepares to move on.”
Leila, he explains, has the fewest moral qualms about her lifestyle. She prefers to stay young, perpetually living in her twenties, and amasses her fortune like a black widow: by targeting working rich men, well respected in their professions but not particularly well-known, marrying them, draining them of their means over a period of ten to fifteen years, and moving to a new place to start over with a new identity. She keeps a few other extramarital partners in her thrall as well for protection, finding highly susceptible targets who are content with getting rare attention from a beautiful woman in exchange for managing her more unsavory tasks—“like the shooter,” Julian explains. It’s a gambit that has gotten more difficult in the last few years with the advent of digital databases and anti-counterfeit technology, but it’s one she intends to continue.
“I have resources that can make the transition easier for her,” Julian continues. “If I offer them to her, help her cover her bases and forge a new identity…there’s a good chance she’ll let us be.”
There are too manyifsin Julian’s solution for my comfort.
“I watched Leila slaughter a room full of people for the crime ofbeing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’m guessing that wasn’t her first rodeo,” I say. “Do you really thinknegotiatingwith her is the answer?”
“Leila is my sister,” Julian tells me. “And we have been through so much together. At the end of the day, even if she grumbles, she wants me to be happy.”
I’m not so sure. I think of the painting in Julian’s living room, hundreds of miles away.Together.Leila, grinning into the sun as Alphonse looks down at them with bemusement. If they are truly like siblings, she has already lost one brother to his human lover. Will she be so willing to lose a second? Or would she think the way I quietly do—You found someone to love once. You will find another.