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Carter only nodded.
Easton stepped past him, and then held back briefly. “You don’t need to tell her she’s funny. Because she’s not. But everything else.”
Maddie winked at me as they scurried out the door. I could hear her voice asking if they could go to Disneyland as their steps faded down the stairs.
“You’re beautiful, and smart, and good,” he whispered in my ear. “But not funny.”
I moved to shove him, but before I could, he was scooping his arms under my knees and hoisting me into his chest. My giggles bounced off the walls as he carried me toward my bedroom. I pointed at the room that had become my own, and he nudged the door with his shoulder. Throwing me onto the bed, he began to crawl over me.
“Wait,” I said. “I have something for you first.”
He backed off the bed and backed up to the door. I leaped and bound to my closet, crawling into the farthest, darkest corner of it. As I stepped out, I noticed Carter looking into the box I’d set on my desk but hadn’t unpacked yet. “You’ve still got my book,” he said, holding up his copy ofThe Alchemist.
I held a canvas in my hands that was almost the size of the one he’d shown me in the studio. I held it up against my chest, facing inward so he couldn’t see it yet. “You said I could keep it.”
He smiled. “I also said if I ever got lost and needed to find myself again, I’d just come find you.” He placed it back into the box. “So, I did.”
I smiled, but didn’t provide a response. Everything I needed to say was held in my hands. I took a deep breath before turning it around and showing it to him.
He tilted his head as his eyes soaked up the canvas. After a moment, his hand found his face as he swayed back a step. “Pep, is that–”
I nodded. “They always reminded me of a jungle. The mixture of all the colors of the earth and how at different times, in different lighting, one color will win over all the others. The gold in them looks like sunlight shining through the leaves of trees.”
“The waterfall,” he whispered. The waterfall wasn’t originally planned. During the sketching phase of the painting, I felt it needed something more. I looked up Carter’s portfolio online and found one of the first pictures he’d ever published.
“I recreated the photo from your portfolio.”
I set the canvas against my desk and backed up next to him. From farther away, it looks mostly like an eye. The lashes fanning out into the top of the canvas. The skin around it was golden and sun kissed. From a distance, the color of the eye looked like morphing shades of green, brown, and gold. Stepping closer, a picture would begin to form within the eye itself. Ferns, and trees. A rock wall with white water cascading down the center of it, right through the pupil, and pooling at the bottom in the color of pure green. Streams of sunlight filtered in across the face on the canvas, shining into the eye itself.
His eye.
“It’s so beautiful, Penelope. I– I don’t know what to say.”
I grabbed his face. “Don’t say anything. It’s my way of thanking you. Thank you for helping me find myself again. For reminding me who I am. What I’m worth.”
His hands found my face too, closing that gap between us. Pulling away, he whispered against my lips, “I have a confession, Pep.”
“What?”
“Your theory about soulmates. About atoms existing in pairs before the Big Bang and finding their way to each other.” I pulled back and looked at him. “I googled it, Pep. It’s scientifically improbable because atoms didn’t exist before the Big Bang. Nothing did.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. I wasn’t sure how else to reply.
“But it’s okay because I have a better one.” He gave methatgrin. “I think that soulmates are the person who inspires us to become the best version of ourselves, regardless of where they fit into it. Even when it means letting someone go when they need to find themselves. When they need to live without us.” He paused, taking a breath. “Selfless love. Our muse. Ouraloha. That’s what we have always been to each other. Since the day we met. That,” he waved at the space between us, “thisis my soulmate theory.”
I felt my eyes begin to mist. I thought back to that writing on the bathroom door in London years ago:atoms are an endless, infinite existence.
So were he and I.
“Ditto,” I said. I was at a complete loss for words, but I knew my smile was saying everything that my mouth was incapable of.
I could see on his face that he knew it too as his mouth feathered against mine, and he kissed me with the force of the sun. The force of the moon– the tides. A kiss that felt like shimmering stars, and rainfall, and golden threads of light.
Five Years Later
Carter
“IF YOU DON’T HURRY UP, we’re going to miss our flight!” she shouted from the living room.
