The sheet was cool against my legs. His hand stayed warm at my hip. The ocean kept up its relentless rhythm outside the window. The world had no idea what was being decided in this bed.
If I die, you die.
The sentence sat in the middle of my chest like a stone. I didn't push it away. I let it sit there, and I let myself look at it from every angle a woman could look at a thing like that.
I didn't want to die.
I had a whole life I loved.
I had my grandmother, friends, and a future where I would continue to write books that educated people, yet entertained too.
And loving him had finally healed up the broken parts of my heart. I loved the idea of giving this new healed spirit a spin.
Fuck. . .but the gifts. . .if this is true. . .he would be safe.
I looked at him.
At his bare chest. At the dragon coiling across his ribs like a living thing. At the muscle in his shoulders that had carried so much for so long. At the brown of his eyes that had gone almost black when he asked me if I wanted him to kill a pregnant woman, and had gone soft again the moment I said no. At the mouth that called me Tora the way nobody had ever called me anything in my whole life.
He was about to leave this island and walk into a war with Hiro beside him. With Reo coordinating on the other side. With the Fangs and Claws at his back and front.
And I loved them all, every single one of them.
I wanted every last one of them to come home.
But Kenji most of all because. . .he now lived in a place within my heart, my soul that no man had ever even touched. He had moved into it without asking permission, set down his bags, hung his coat, and absolutely claimed it.
I cannot live without him. I just. . .can’t. . .
The thought arrived, and I waited to see if it scared me.
It didn't.
It was the truest thing I had ever known about myself.
I had spent my whole life as a woman who could survive anything. I had survived loss. I had survived loneliness. I had survived being underestimated by every room I had ever walked into. I had survived being the strong friend, the calm one, the one who held everybody else together with hands that nobody ever thought to hold back. I had been a Black woman in a world that had not been built with my softness in mind, and I had still somehow made softness anyway.
I could survive a lot of things in this fucked up life, but I could not survive Kenji not coming back.
And. . .I was slowly realizing that this feeling was not weakness. It was not a woman losing herself in a man.
It was a grown woman who had loved enough wrong men in her life to recognize when she had finally found the right one.
If he didn't make it home, I would not be living anyway.
Sure, I would be a body still walking, a voice still answering, a woman still pretending. Going through motions. Smiling at people. Putting one foot in front of the other through a life that had lost its actual reason.
No. . .I can’t. . .
If the rite tied me to him, then the rite was just naming what was already true.
My soul had already chosen.
The earth was just being asked to witness.
I shivered. “I’ve got to do it.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
