Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)(26)

“Yes, I’m sorry for leaving yesterday,” she said. “I felt ill. And I overslept.”

“Do you need me to send for a doctor?”

“No!” She cleared her throat. “No but thank you. I’m on the mend. Tell Autry I’ll be in first thing tomorrow.”

Roman nodded, but his eyes narrowed as he intently studied her, like he sensed her lie. “Can I get you anything else? Are you hungry? Should I fetch a sandwich or soup or whatever else you’d like?”

She gaped for a second, shocked by his offer. His gaze began to flicker around the room again, taking in the shambles she was so desperate to hide from him. Panic surged through her. “No! No, I don’t need anything. You can go now, Kitt.”

He frowned. The sunlight limned his body, but a shadow danced over his face.

“Of course. I’ll leave, as you want. I brought your coat, by the way.”

“Right. You, erm, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.” She awkwardly accepted the coat, still holding her blouse shut. She avoided making eye contact.

“It was no trouble,” he said.

She could feel him staring at her, as if daring her to meet his gaze.

She couldn’t.

She would break if she did, and she waited for him to retrace his steps over the threshold.

“Will you lock the door behind me?” he asked.

Iris nodded, hugging the trench coat to her chest.

Roman finally shut the door.

She continued to stand in the empty flat. As if she had grown roots.

The minutes flowed, but she hardly sensed time. Everything felt distorted, like she was looking at her life through fractured glass. Dust motes spun in the air around her. A deep breath unspooled from her as she went to lock the door, and then she thought better of it, and looked through the peephole again.

He was still standing there, hands shoved into his coat pockets, his dark hair windblown. Waiting. Her annoyance flared until she bolted the door. As soon as he heard the locks slide, Roman Kitt turned and left.





{12}





A Shadow You Carry


Iris spent the rest of that day in a haze, trying to make sense of things. But it was like her life had shattered into a hundred pieces, and she wasn’t sure how to make it fit back together. She thought that perhaps the ache she felt would never diminish, and she bit her nails to the quick as she wandered through the flat like a ghost.

Eventually she settled in her room, on the floor. She reached for her grandmother’s typewriter and drew it out into the dusky light.

If she thought about it too hard, the words would become ice. And so Iris didn’t think; she let the words pass through her heart to her mind, down her arms to her fingertips, and she wrote:

Sometimes I’m afraid to love other people.

Everyone I care about eventually leaves me, whether it’s death or war or simply because they don’t want me. They go places I can’t find, places I can’t reach. And I’m not afraid to be alone, but I’m tired of being the one left behind. I’m tired of having to rearrange my life after the people within it depart, as if I’m a puzzle and I’m now missing pieces and I will never feel that pure sense of completion again.

I lost someone close to me, yesterday. It doesn’t feel real yet.

And I’m not sure who you are, where you are. If you are breathing the same hour, the same minute as me, or if you are decades before or years to come. I don’t know what is connecting us—if it’s magical thresholds or conquered god bones or something else we’ve yet to discover. Most of all, I don’t know why I’m writing to you now. But here I am, reaching out to you. A stranger and yet a friend.

All those letters of mine you received for several months … I thought I was writing to Forest. I wrote with the unfaltering, teeth-clenched hope that they would reach him despite the kilometers between us. That my brother would read my words, even if they were minced with pain and fury, and he would come home and fill the void I feel and fix the messiness of my life.

But I realize that people are just people, and they carry their own set of fears, dreams, desires, pains, and mistakes. I can’t expect someone else to make me feel complete; I must find it on my own. And I think I was always writing for myself, to sort through my loss and worry and tangled ambitions. Even now, I think about how effortless it is to lose oneself in words, and yet also find who you are.

I hope I’m making sense. I’m probably not, because I’m writing to you but I’m also writing for me. And I don’t expect you to respond, but it helps to know someone is hearing me. Someone is reading what I pour onto a page.

It helps to know that I’m not alone tonight, even as I sit in quiet darkness.

She sat frozen for what could have been a minute or an hour, and eventually she roused enough courage to pull the sheet from the typewriter and fold it. To slip it over the threshold and into the portal. Because that was the hardest part—sharing the words she wrote. Words that could splinter steel, exposing the soft places she preferred to hide.

Night fell. She lit a candle. She paced the flat. She told herself to eat something, to drink something, but she wasn’t hungry, even though she felt empty.

She thought she might be in shock, because she was numb and kept waiting for her mother to return home, to sweep in through the door.