He lifts his concentrated gaze slowly, like waking from a dream he never expected to escape.
Dessin.
Dark mahogany eyes slam into me.
I double over. Unearthed and uprooted at the silent killing and resurrection that becomes me from getting to look into those eyes again.
“Skylenna…” My soulmate’s face breaks.
That voice, all-knowing and unlike any other.
It’s home.
I wail like the grieving widow I’ve been all these years. In three versions, he sees me in the dirt—the one who fought for him to remember me in that prison, the one who mourned him even though he never died, and the one who kept going, first out of spite. Then, because our babies didn’t deserve to have a mother who couldn’t let go of his memory.
Who loved a ghost more than them.
Across the open area of woods, he witnesses me crumble.
And his body collides with mine. On his knees in the dirt, slamming my upper body to his. Dessin folds himself so tightly around my pain, I can’t decide if I’ve died and this is heaven.
“D-D-Dessin! Oh god!” I bawl into his shoulder.
A long-since fossilized bit of my heart takes its first breath as my one true love says my name. Over and over and over again.
“Do you remember?!” I gasp and sob simultaneously. “The c-coma!”
He kisses the side of my head furiously. “I remember.”
I cry harder, releasing every lonely moment I spent in my bedroom closet sobbing into a pillow so Sapphire and Krimson wouldn’t hear.
I cry for every second I sat at his bedside and prayed for God to give him back.
I cry for the long days of pregnancy when I would feel a kick and have a breakdown that Dessin wasn’t awake to feel it too.
I cry my children.
I cry for DaiSzek.
I cry for Dessin and every single one of his alters.
“Sapphire—she time traveled. She changed something! She saved you!” I am in utter disbelief that Dessin is holding me in his arms. That he’s taking on my breakdown as his home. That’s here. He’s with me.
He is awake.
“I know, baby. I’ve been here. I’ve been here to see it all…” Dessin says, low and gravelly against my ear.
“What?!”
“You couldn’t see me, but I know you felt my presence. I saw the birth of our children. I watched you cry all alone when they’d go to sleep at night. I was holding you while you slept. I never missed a conversation when you’d hold my hand and tell me about your day.”
“Oh!” I claw at his back, unable to get enough of him.
The love that pours out of me is infinite, rich in power, and absolute.
“Twenty-one years, Dessin…you were gone… It was so hard. I—died inside.”
Dessin pulls me a centimeter away to look me in the eyes. The bridge of his nose brushes the tip of mine, and the chemistry is still there—only now, it’s a dam losing its foundation, swelling over to wipe out anything in sight. It’s twenty-one years of being apart. The unbearable longing to have him touch me every second of every day is destroying my mind, spiraling my thoughts out of control.
