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I can’t feel awkward about it.

The moment I get ahold of him he stops. He speaks. “Oh, did I scare you? You must tell me when I scare you. I have no idea what feels terrifying about me to you anymore. Before it was everything, but now—” he starts to say.

And I cut him off.

“Now it’s nothing,” I tell him.

But the most shocking part is: it’s true. I look into his face and there is no rush of fear, no horror, not even disgust. And I know it isn’t because he was Sten, this isn’t because he was some good version of himself. This is the good version. Wearier now, with his memories intact, colder in the eyes, too.

But the coldness doesn’t seem cruel to me anymore.

It seems like what it is: he is numb. He has died inside a thousand times, and simply doesn’t know how to live anymore. I can see it, I can understand it, I’ve felt some variation of it myself for what must be many more than a few centuries. There must be so much more that my human brain just couldn’t contain.

Or didn’t want to.

Or was forced not to, I think with a shiver. Then want to follow this thought down to its logical conclusion. Someone has cursed us; someone put a curse on him, and we need to find out who and why. But I can’t focus on that at all.

Mainly because I told him I don’t fear him anymore, and now he’s looking at me with too-big and wondering eyes. “How can that be, so quickly?” he says. Though I think he already knows the answer.

Whatever stopped me from believing him is gone.

All there is are the memories of the man he was all along—some from only a few days ago. Some from the past, suddenly reordered, shifted, made into something more. Someone shot an arrow at me once, and he put his hand in front of it. I can see myself stepping off a building in despair, and feel him grabbing the back of my coat.

I thought he strangled me once; now he has me by the shoulders, shaking me, screaming at me to understand that something else had tried to kill me, something else had shoved me in front of a train and trapped me in a gas station and on and on and on. And the only thing that is strange to me about all of it is how strange he never thought it was. He thought so little of himself that it just made sense—that even one lifetime of me loving him was too much.

How could he expect it a second time? A third time? A seventh?

“Because I’ve loved you for a thousand years. And I’ll love you for a thousand more,” I tell him. “I was just waiting to remember that. I was waiting for you to wake me up—and you did.”

“It was you, though. You broke the curse.”

“Maybe so. But then you showed me who you are. Who you really are, who you really were when I fell in love with you. You restarted everything that was inside of me already. And so now here we are.”

“That’s why I want you to take my memories again. I want to be him.”

“The very fact that you’re asking says how much you are. The fact that you told me to tell you if I’m scared. The fact that you’re looking at me the way you are. Do you think I can’t see it in your face?” I ask.

Then I touch him there.

My hand is trembling, and it feels just a little bit funny. Like seeing double, and one side is everything I know to be true, and the other is all the false things I saw before. But when he doesn’t flinch, when his eyes drift closed to feel my touch—the false part fades away.

I can touch him whenever I like.

I can run my fingers through his hair—and I do. I stroke it gently until it falls across his forehead, soft as anything. And after that, I just can’t seem to hold back. I have to see what happens when I kiss him. Just a little, just gently, barely a press of my lips against his.

But strangely, he doesn’t seem to react.

He just stays very, very quiet, and very still—as if kissing him has done the opposite of whatever happens to Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. It has frozen him like this: me in his arms and our lips just touching. Nothing but the wind and the crash of the waves breaking the sudden silence, as if somehow I’ve done something wrong.

It takes me a good minute to understand that we’re not on the grass anymore.

I see the tops of trees in the distance out of the corner of my eye, and jolt back, surprised. But then he opens his eyes, and it slowly sinks through me why, why—my kiss lifted him. It made him fly. Like Superman, I think, and then kiss him again. And this time, he kisses me back.

He kisses me all the way across the ocean, and beyond.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

He sets me down through the open window into my bedroom, hands still in mine as my feet slowly drift to the carpeted floor. Though truthfully, it feels like I’m still floating. And it only stops when he says, “Well, then, I should take my leave.” As if that is a perfectly ordinary and incontestable thing I could let him do after realizing someone is my eternal soulmate who crossed oceans of time to be with me.