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“It doesn’t matter now.” I grasped his shoulders so tight that his back cracked, enveloping myself in his touch. “Whatever happened then doesn’t matter now. We’re alive. We’re okay.”
“I’ll give you guys a minute,” Hya said behind me. “When you’re ready, let’s go see your kids.”
* * *
An hour or so later, once we’d collected ourselves enough, we went home. We wanted to see our babies, but before we did, we needed to shower and get out of the hospital gowns.
As we stepped into the cast iron tub, and water spewed from the spigot overhead, we wrapped our arms around one another, and we took a few moments to readjust.
There were so many things I remembered but felt like distant memories. The shower head was one of them. Fuck, I could kiss the man who created the first hot water tank.
It was still early morning, and the sun was just rising. Nix—Jeremyhad flicked a switch, and lights came on. I remembered electricity, but I’d still jolted when the light shined.
I remembered the man whose arms were around me. I remembered every fleck of cyan in his cobalt eyes. I remembered every muscle that flexed beneath my palms, every inch of his calloused hands on my bare back. I remembered every gray hair through his waves of black.
But he was so similar to Nix that when I closed my eyes and lay on his chest as the hot water fell from above to our bare skin, it felt like I was thousands of years in the past, holding him in the rain.
“This is so fucking weird,” he murmured in my ear, kissing my neck. Even his voice. It was a bit different, perhaps an octave deeper than Nix’s had been, but just hearing it made my belly flip. “You’re here, and I’m here, and it’s like…”
“Like no time has passed, but like lifetimes have passed, at the same time?” I tilted my head back, smiling up at him.
“No.” He tried to smile, but his eyes flooded. “It feels like forever since I held you, do gràs.”
My chest warmed when he used that phrase.Babywas our usual pet name. “Really? It feels like what happened in the Elder’s Hall was an hour ago to me.”
The tears in his eyes bubbled over. He held my cheek tighter, brushing his thumb over my lip. He opened his mouth to speak then clamped it shut.
I tucked a piece of damp hair behind his ear. “What’s the matter?”
“I didn’t die that day,” he whispered. “I… It was a long time before I died.”
Oh.
Our memories from that life had been fleeting. We only knew bits and pieces prior to our venture down memory lane, as Hya called it. We’d always assumed that I died, and he died right after.
“How long?”
Jeremy swallowed. His eyes didn’t leave mine, full of grief and pain. “Somewhere around a thousand years.”
My stomach dropped, jaw close behind.
A thousand years.
He lived after I died for a thousand years. Unlike the rest of us who’d forgotten who we were in every life we lived, for those thousand years, he had every memory. We’d been partners through all things for almost three hundred thousand years before that. Losing me, losing our children, and going on for so long after must’ve felt like…
“Like I was missing a limb.” He wiped the tears from his cheek, still holding my torso tight to his. Giving a dry laugh, he said, “I’m sorry. When you died, I lost access to your abilities, and now I hear everyone’s thoughts again, and I think it’s gonna take me a minute to control it.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered, soothing my hands over his back. “Areyouokay?”
“Now, I am.” His smile was genuine this time. “I wasn’t. From the day I lost you all on, I was a mess. But now, I’m okay.”
I rolled to the tips of my toes and kissed him softly. He held me there, embracing every tender brush of my lips. Much to my surprise, I didn’t feel his cock move, and I was almost offended.
“Thousand years, huh?” I whispered at his lips.
“About.”
“And kissing me isn’t even getting you hard.” I made atsk, tsk, tsksound as I pulled away, giving a teasing smile. “You find someone else while I was gone?”
