Author: admin

“So … this is it then.” He stared impassively over her shoulder, as if the tree bark behind her was more interesting than she was. Or perhaps like she was a ghost, something to be looked through and studiously ignored, for fear that acknowledgment might lead to levitating objects and screaming violence.

“I’m not doing this to hurt you.” Frustration lingered in her tone, maybe a touch of sadness as well, but that would simply be his imagination. It ran wild with things it shouldn’t at the worst of times. It explained why he found himself here of all places.

Curling his hands into fists, he met her eyes. “Of course not,” he said, something alien overtaking his throat, speaking words for him. “That would imply you actually cared. Ever. At all.”

“Stop being melodramatic,” she said, eyes narrowing, cutting the beautiful brown of her eyes to mere angry slits.

“I’m not being melodramatic, Ary. Just honest. Something you always had trouble with.”

“How’s this for honest, asshole.” From thin air, Ary produced the ring, and Rafe had to stop himself from choking. He fell back a step without thinking, and he swore he could hear something shattering in the distance. It felt like his heart.

Ary hesitated at the violent reaction, a moment of unsurety, but she still held the ring out toward him, cupped in the soft curve of her palm. How many times had he held that palm, grasped it tight against his own? How many times had he thought of forever, holding that palm? How sure had he been that it would always be his to hold?

Sand and fire. His throat was scorched and his heart was burning.

“Take it back,” he said. The words were his this time, no alien anger controlling his mouth, but it didn’t sound like him. Not as he knew himself. He was strong and powerful, and he would never break at something so harmless. Of all the weapons she could have yielded against him, he never thought it would be a promise he had first gifted her.

“I don’t want it, Rafe. It’s not mine.” She thrust her palm out toward him for emphasis, though her eyes remained wary. Perhaps she didn’t recognize him either.

Trying to get air into his lungs, Rafe took another step back and turned, hunching in on himself as his world began crumbling around him. She didn’t understand. Of course it was hers. In all the ways it counted, in every way, it was hers.

Unbidden, he heard them. The voices of his family, everything they had ever said to him, and he burned with the truth of the words now.  

“She’s not one of us, Rafe.”

“She can’t possibly understand what it means.”

“You deserve better than she can ever give you.”

It wasn’t about deserving, he had told them. It wasn’t about whether she fit, he said. It was about love. They had scoffed, and he had walked away, sure in himself, in her.

He had never wanted them proven right.

But it was done, wasn’t it? The words had been said, and Ary had made her choice, and that choice was no longer him. It had been, once upon a time, but not anymore.

There were a million things that needed saying, and every one of them got stuck in his throat. “Keep it,” he said instead. “I can’t take it back.”

“Rafe,” she began, stone in her voice. The air buzzed in warning, Ary’s hair started to rise into the air with no accompanying wind. Part of Rafe flinched at the violence directed toward him; the other part just heaved a sigh, a weak and tired thing.

“Ary.” Her name held everything he couldn’t say, so many emotions bottled up there, so many thoughts flayed open and hung out for her to see, bare and naked, exposed in the worst ways. Immediately, the buzz disappeared, her feet touched ground, and her hair fell softly against her shoulders once more. Realization dawned.

“You can’t take it back.” A repetition of his words, that was all. Yet they said so much coming from her mouth.

They both looked down, away from each other’s eyes, as if it might be better to focus their attention on the elephant in the room, that big thing taking up all the space and making it hard for Rafe to breath. Innocent. Simple. It sat innocently and simply in Ary’s palm, and Rafe had never hated a part of himself so much than in that moment. Because that’s what it was. The ring. It was a part of him.

Strong, sturdy, black. He had carved it from the burnt ashes of his hometrees, the ones the humans had burned down centuries ago. They were regrowing now, new life where the old had made their beds, but they would never be the same. The ashes had been ancient, like him. They were a part of his childhood, his soul. Maybe not a reassuring color for a soul ring, black like death and life-destroying storms. Black like the night which beget monsters beyond the imagination. But Ary had never been afraid of the dark, and she had always been a storm herself.  Wasn’t that why he loved her?

“Rafe, you didn’t.” Her face was anguish now, pure and tortured, and Rafe called himself a fool for ever thinking she didn’t care about him. Of course she did. It was in the tilt of her mouth, the small but important step she took toward him. She brought her second hand up to cradle the ring like something precious, and Rafe turned away then, firming his jaw and clenching his teeth so tight it hurt. It was answer enough. “You’re an idiot,” she said it vehemently, not an ounce of doubt behind it. And Rafe accepted it because it was true. He really was a fool.

A wind swept through, brushing his cheek and winding through his hair. Soft and gentle. The forest was still like death around them, not a single leaf rustled, and he knew it was her. Because they both wanted to touch right now, but they both knew they couldn’t, not really. The forest groaned, a sound like grief, and Ary’s touch disappeared. When Rafe looked at her again, the ring was gone. Her hands fell harmless by her sides.

“I’ll keep the ring, Rafe.”

Muscles he hadn’t even realized were clenched tight suddenly relaxed, and he felt dizzy with the relief. The forest ceased groaning, the building roar dying back to the soft creak and song a forest made in the quiet.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?” she asked, clearly curious, and maybe, he thought, slightly offended.

“I don’t know what I think, Ary. All I know is I’ve been pretty stupid of late, thinking things I shouldn’t have. I think I should stop thinking.”

“Don’t do that. Not to yourself.”

She stepped closer, like approaching a wild animal, and he watched, too captivated by her curves and the familiar chocolate of her skin to flinch when the hand landed on his shoulder. He just followed the line of her arm to her neck, the collarbones marked by gems. At the moment, they were clear blue, like the sky in summertime. It suddenly dawned on him why they would never work. Because he may have been dark, but he was always soft, and she may shine like light, but every piece of Ary was a jagged edge just waiting for someone to cut themselves. Had he finally done that? Cut himself to pieces because he hadn’t been careful enough to watch where he was going, where he was falling?

“I’ll keep the ring,” Ary repeated, like a promise. Her voice came through like she was far away, like he was underwater. He saw her lips moving, and it took a moment for his brain to catch up. “But I can’t put it on.”

Hope lived, breathed, and died in his chest in the space of those horribly few seconds. He pushed the grief away, and nodded, once, controlled.

“I know.” To put it on would be to bind herself to him in the way he had already bound himself to her. And only one of them was fool enough to do that.

“Stop thinking, Rafe. Just for a second.” And because he wouldn’t, she bridged the final space between them. She didn’t kiss him, like part of him was simultaneously hoping and dreading for. She wrapped her arms around him instead. The strange urge to cry hit him then, before it passed as quickly as its onset. He felt comforted, safe, whole. Ary had always had that effect on him.

“I’m not leaving you for someone else, Rafe.”

He loved the sound of his name on her tongue, and he thought she must know that. She said it all the time.

“You are though, in a way. But I suppose it could be worse.” He held still for a moment, enjoyed the warm heat of her pressed against his chest, her lips brushing his neck. He could almost forget everything else and just live in this moment. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said instead. Unwinding his arms from her torso, he stepped back so he could look at her, so she could look at him. They looked at each other, and Rafe wasn’t quite sure what Ary saw. “It doesn’t have to mean you’ll come back, it doesn’t have to mean you’ll ever see me again. We don’t have to be friends, and we’re clearly not—,” he cut himself off, breathing heavy. “We’re clearly not soul bound so …” He trailed off because he truly wasn’t sure how to end it. He’d had a thought when he started, but it had fizzled out, perhaps too painful to think, much less say aloud.

Ary snorted, head tilting back to look up at the sky. The dark trees tried their best to block it out, but spots of blue and white peaked through gnarled branches. Rafe’s was a whole other world to the girl of wind and sky, storms and unruly seas.

“Always so eloquent.” Ary loved to tease him, and this was easy, because she wasn’t eloquent either. So much and so little had been said between them. A bridge was half-way built, but it was a still a long way to the other side. Rafe wasn’t sure what he could possibly find there.

Something heavy pressed against his palm, as Ary stepped back, and he turned startled eyes down. Sitting in his hand was a black stone, black like the ring Ary had whisked away, black like the sky at the start of the end of the world. That breeze rustled his hair again, dragging like lips over his cheekbone.

“We may not be soul bound, Rafe. But we could never be nothing to each other. I will come back.” Taking his eyes from the stone, he met hers, and something like a smile but not quite curved her lips. “Until then, think of me when it rains, would you?”

It was so like her. A quick quip, a carefree statement, hiding how she felt behind airy words. It made Rafe feel normal.

The wind picked up, leaves danced in the breeze, Rafe blinked, and in the flutter of his lashes, she was gone, the leaves still dancing in her wake.

Gripping the stone tight in his hand, Rafe thought of Ary as a hurricane. There was destruction in the path she left behind, always. No one remained unscathed. But there was hope too, in the gouges she left behind, a peace that hadn’t existed before she swept through.

And when a drop of rain fell on his nose, Rafe smiled.