Page 128 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
She attempted a brave smile. It was dragged down by sadness and flickered out of existence.
“I’m not sure it’s living,” said Mordaunt.
She looked into his grief-grey eyes, and she knew that Mrs. Parson had been right. He loved her.
“This can’t be it,” he said.
“It has to be,” said Aurienne. “Please—please let’s not draw it out. I was a Means to an End. We achieved that end. That’s what you should tell yourself.”
He took her hand in his.
“You’re going to say something beautiful,” said Aurienne. “Please don’t.”
He did, disregarding both of their sufferings. “I know you care very much what I am, not about who I am. I’m a Fyren, but I’m also just a man of flesh and blood. I want you to know that that kiss at the dance was real, and every one afterwards. That I regret nothing. That as much as they hurt me now, I would make every one of those decisions again.”
“Can’t you make this easy and say I never mattered?” whispered Aurienne.
“I can’t lie about this.”
He was vivid, scarred, imperfect, beautiful, far too in love with her. And she, frightened, knew that she was far too in love with him. Her heart harassed her, pulled her from logic to a known suffering; he was a Fyren; there was no future here; the future could be nothing but pain.
“There’s no road together,” said Aurienne. “It would lead nowhere. Nowhere happy, anyway. We are nothing but a could-have-been.”
She stepped towards the waystone. The increased distance betweenthem hurt; it was a cut, it wanted to bleed. It felt ugly, it felt wrong, but the other side was wrong, too.
“Be well,” said Aurienne. “I—I hope we don’t meet again.”
She put her tacn on the waystone.Mind the gapflashed, blurred with tears.
The ley line would draw her in. Part of her would be left behind.
She dared to use his name because it didn’t matter anymore. “Goodbye, Osric.”
As the ley line took her, he pressed something heavy into her palm.
She opened her hand upon arrival at Swanstone.
It was his signet ring.
25
Such Sweet Sorrow
Osric
So Osric and Aurienne came to their inevitable goodbye. Osric had known it was coming, but foreknowledge of the pain did nothing to alleviate it. He had wished to make more time together at Rosefell Hall. More chances to say the things that lay heavy on his heart. He had tried. But, after the diffractor had been put away, Aurienne hadn’t wished to celebrate, or find an excuse to stay. She had concluded their agreement like the business deal it was, swiftly, decisively.
All her brilliance had vanished into the waystone, leaving Osric behind with a pile of what-ifs and a hand unheld. He let her go. He let her go, this dream, this could-have-been.
The worst part was that Aurienne, too, was unhappy. She tried to keep it walled in, but it had been obvious in the sorrow-drawn line of her brows, in the way she wrapped her arms around herself as they walked to the waystone, in her final, half-hearted wave, which came with the glimpse of the tacn that bound her to her Order and excluded him from her life.
We are nothing but a could-have-been.
Another of her eight-word horror stories.
There had been pain in her, too. Perversely, that gave him a bit of hope.
(He was still sick. Hope, the bane, the wretched disease.)
