Page 25 of Where Light Cannot Follow

This man beside me has some purpose in walking with me.

I don't understand it yet, but I'm trying.

"You may join my mind again... if it helps you." I tack the last bit on, rushed and sounding far less certain than I intended.

Virgil turns to look at me. He's such a strange human—if we’re even human at all anymore. He’s difficult to read. Most people have become boring to me because it’s so easy to discern their motivations. There are perhaps a dozen things that drive most, and once you discover the driver, you can lead them anywhere you wish.

Virgil seems far more difficult to assign a simple label.

He laughs freely, yet seems haunted by ghosts I can't name.

He walks along steadily but pushes through realms he has no desire to traverse.

"Are you certain?" he asks. "I would not take what you have not chosen to give.”

Even his speaking it aloud—the idea of me consenting to allow him some private portion of myself—sends a sensation crawling down my neck. I've long learned not to trust others with any wisp of vulnerability.

"As you said, you'll make a better guide if you can see to navigate. And if you're not focused on your own struggles.”

He turns his face away at that. There's shame in this man. Embarrassment. Such a strange feeling to have over enjoying food. Plenty of humans give in to that mortal failing. Which makes me suspect that food itself had nothing to do with his hesitation through the last temptation.

"This next realm is the middle part of your genesis," he speaks in that soft way that matches his smooth skin and golden curls. “Many find it to be the most... difficult… part of the journey."

Ahead stands a door made of copper, studded with bolts, anchored in this eerie world like a monument. I already know what that space will reveal. My muscles stiffen, and I open my mouth to change my mind about allowing him into my thoughts, but then I force my lips to close.

It won't do us well to both be reliving whatever horrors we've endured. Whatever poor choices we've made. And if I'm dead and in hell, it matters little if he sees my shame.

"That is fine," I say, and before he can push back further, I open the door.

We step inside, my footsteps echoing. Virgil's shoes—ivory white sneakers, oddly enough—make not a single sound. The room that appears draws me up short.

The apartment is so small I can see everything at once: the single book-sized window, the neatly made bed that takes up most of the floor space, the kitchen, and bathroom, which are more like twin closets. Nonetheless, a completely impractical desk-sized Christmas tree is perched on the single table, consuming valuable workspace. The lights reflect in the window, making the space feel larger. Warmer.

Someone walks past me, and I tense, wishing I could burn this scene from existence.

I would take a hundred realms of temptation, a thousand moments of shame born from staring at some naked figure writhing beneath a shower's spray, ten thousand feasts, a million instances of whatever weakness damned me to this place.

Anything to avoid the moment I know we're in... and what it inevitably leads to.

Matthew walks up. He looks exactly as I remember him, but also rich with details I'd forgotten. He's shorter than me, slim with thick dark hair and a scar through one eyebrow—a childhood biking accident that made his mother pray to every saint she knew and a few she invented in the moment. His lips are full, his body artificially thickened by the hand-knitted sweater made by his grandmother.

"Hey, babe. How was work?"

I kiss him, gently, and something winged and soft and new flutters warm in my stomach. "Exhausting. I'm not sure I can get Christmas Eve off, after all."

"Oh." His entire body drops, and I want to snatch my words back. To tell him I'll quit my miserable intern position. But we both have dreams. His lie in art, mine in business, both of us trying to survive in this overpriced and heartless city. He brightens almost instantly, as he always does. "Well, that's all right. We'll have Christmas Day, right? And I picked up some Chinese. I got those god-awful flavorless vegetables and chicken you like."

I catch him from behind, wrapping an arm around his waist, stopping him as he walks toward the closet we call a kitchen. "They're healthy."

"They're inedible."

I rest my chin on his shoulder, breathing in the sweetness of him for a moment, before whispering what I've known was coming. "I had a strange phone call today. My father reached out to me. He wants to get lunch."

“Really?” Matthew looks back at me and—oh, how close he is. For a moment, I'm not Michael Dante, nearly forty. Instead, I'm babe and I'm twenty-seven and in love and broke with a Master’s degree and not much else, and it's all worth it. "Well," he says, "are you going to go?"

"I think I should. Hear him out."

"Do you want me to come with you?"