Page 170 of Ghost Ribbon

“My star.” I smiled against the side of his neck. “The one I told you about when we were little.”

There was a pause. Then I felt the quiet shift in his shoulders, the way his breathing changed. Even without seeing his face, I knew he was smiling. I could feel it in the way his body softened under me, in the careful way his hands held the backs of my thighs.

“I watched it every day while I was growing up,” he said quietly.

My fingers curled weakly into the fabric of his shirt. “You did?”

“Yeah. I always thought of you when I saw it.”

“That means…” My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “That means we were never really apart.”

Alexei was quiet for a few steps. When he spoke again, it was a whisper. “No. We weren’t.”

I rested my cheek against his shoulder and kept my eyes on the star. “We will never be apart.”

We walked a little further in silence. The sound of the sea was getting closer now.

“Alexei?”

“Mm.”

“I’m glad it was you,” I whispered. “In the garden. I’m glad it was your eyes I found first.”

His hands tightened just slightly under my thighs. “I’m glad it was you too,” he answered.

I smiled again, weaker this time, and pressed a soft kiss to the side of his neck.

“You can put me down now.”

My feet touched the ground, and I looked at the sea. “It’s beautiful.”

I could feel his gaze even without turning. The constant attention he directed at me at all times. He was always watching. “Are you sure you aren’t cold?”

Yes, I was cold. He had made sure I was dressed warmly and wrapped me in layers before we left, but I was still cold because my heart wasn’t pumping enough blood in my body. “Maybe a little.”

He took his jacket off and slid it over my shoulders. It was large. It swallowed me and I felt a sense of déjà vu. The strange feeling that this has happened before. A child with green eyes appeared in my mind and I smiled.

It was bizarre. When I looked at him I saw not just the present version of him but all the versions. The boy in the garden. The boy on the rooftop. The man standing in front of me now. All of them the same person. All of them mine. All of them connected by a thread that led from my heart to his.

His eyes moved across my face. “You seem pale. Maybe we should head back.”

I knew I was pale.

I was pale because I was fighting my last breaths. My body was spending its remaining energy on keeping the organs running and had nothing left for making the skin look alive.

I could feel myself falling away.

And I think he saw it.

I knew he saw it because of the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw, the response he could not fully hide no matter how hard he tried. His control failed when it came to me. It always had.

He wanted to take me back but I wanted to be here because if this was the end, if this was the reality that my body was telling me was coming, then this was where I wanted it to happen. Here. Under these stars. With him.

“Let’s stay a bit.”

“Marco.” I felt him panicking. “You don’t look okay. We should call the doctor, okay?”

I brought my hand up and caressed his face.