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Every moment.
Every kiss and trip and fall.
I sighed, accepting how differently today would turn out to be and how thankful I was that I had this final chance to love him. “I meant...instead of a stuffy interview, I give you a story. A story people whisper about. A story about a nymph and her lion and everything else between.”
Margot reached over with the biggest grin and touched the back of my paper-thin hand. “With every part of me...yes. Yes, please.”
I twisted my wrist and let her link her fingers with mine.
A flashback of my much younger fingers wrapping around the arm of a teenage boy filled my mind.
My thoughts tripped back to that fateful day, and I sucked in a breath as so many others unspooled.
I sank like a stone into a sea of them.
I let them crash over me with waves of tenderness, brokenness, and home.
And when the last one washed away, I focused on the two young reporters.
This story wouldn’t be the one they came for.
It would be so, so much more.
“I thought he was dead when I first saw him. I jumped overboard and swam as fast as I could, all while my father yelled, my mother screamed, and the pod of dolphins we’d been studying swarmed around me...”
Chapter One
*
Aslan
*
(Moon in Latin: Luna)
I’D NEVER BEEN SO SCARED OF THE sky before.
Never thought clouds could reach down and smother me. Never believed rain could fall fast enough to drown me. Never thought thunder could reach inside my chest and stop my terrified heart with its fury.
BOOM!
My mother screamed. My sister screamed. My cousin screamed.
But my father just kept holding on to all of us. Draped over us the best he could as the boat tossed side to side, desperately trying to cast us out of it.
Lightning forked.
Terror sliced.
Another BOOM!
“It’s okay. We’re okay,” my father chanted, his voice long since salt-whipped and hoarse. “There is land beneath our feet. There is always land, even when there is an ocean between us.”
My sister pressed tighter against me, huddled into a tiny, storm-dripping ball. “Aslan, make it stop. Please, make it stop!”
I tried to be brave like my father.
“It’s okay, Melike.” I wrapped my arms around her tiny figure, doing my best not to crush her as another wave tipped us high, so high, then shot us soaring down its face, landing back on the churning angry surface as froth splashed high into the sky, clashing with rain, fighting wet with wet.
