Page 29 of Laced in Longing

A wave of exhaustion crashes over me. I haven’t slept well since the night on the floor with him—my mysterious visitor. The dreams come every night, but they don’t provide the rest my body needs. Each morning I wake more tired than when I went to sleep, as if part of me remains in those dream landscapes, wandering endlessly.

Groaning, I flop like a fish until I’m under my sheet fully clothed.

I don’t know what to do…none of this feels sustainable. Pretending I’m fine while a man from another world visits and leaves gifts every morning while hiding it from the doctor, or telling said doctor and living the rest of my life in a sterile prison? Neither option appeals.

Instead of stressing about my predicament, I allow myself to escape to where he waits for me; toward the only peace I’ve known in years.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ASH

My flower thinks I’m a fantasy.

She sits on her bed in that grimy apartment, twirling one of my gifts through her fingers. Her brow creases as she examines it, searching for answers in its delicate veins. I watch from the space between worlds as her expression flits through several emotions. It’s amusing how her lips form silent questions when she believes there’s no audience.

I suppose her assumption isn’t wholly incorrect. To her limited mortal perception, I exist as a shadow—a dream-figure that dissolves with daylight. A creation of her loneliness, perhaps, or evidence of her mind deteriorating at its edges. It’s the explanation any rational human would reach.

But I am very much real.

More real than the temporary structures mortals build to house their temporary lives. More real than their laws of nature and their narrow understanding of what can and cannot be. I existed before her kind took their first breath, and I will exist long after their last city crumbles to dust.

I press my palm against the veil, tracking ripples as it yields to my touch—not solid or liquid—resistant yet permeable to those who understand its nature. Through it, the distant thrum of her heartbeat calls to me. A rhythm I memorized during her first life.

Need courses through me, and I sigh. I want to tear through the veil. Cross the distance between us and feel her skin beneath my fingers. Not as the phantom touch I’ve been limited to for centuries, but as solid contact between two beings sharing the same plane of existence. I yearn to hold her; gather her against me until that perpetual sadness in her gaze drifts away. To claim her, finally, as what she has always been: mine.

Perhaps she doesn’t believe in my existence because I’ve been too cautious. Too patient. Speaking only a handful of words in her dreams, and never revealing the full truth of what she is to me or what we are meant to be together.

Though I believe I’ve been right to proceed with care…this version of Maven is so damaged. She carries wounds that will never heal, bearing scars both visible and hidden. Her spirit flinches away from the slightest touch, expecting pain where there might be comfort, and that is something her soul would carry to each reincarnation moving forward.

So, I can wait no longer. She’s ready for more, whether she realizes it or not. The sooner I show my true self and intentions, the sooner she can consent to leaving the mortal world with me.

And she will consent.

She must.

I refuse to watch her die again. Or to track her soul through the void as it seeks another vessel. I’m done waiting through decades of childhood and adolescence before revealing myself once more. Not when she belongs here, with me, safe from the cruelties of Earth.

With one last glance at her face, I step back from the veil and turn to survey the chamber I’ve prepared for her in our home. Tall windows line the eastern wall, framing views of my realm’s unending twilight. The sky beyond glows with colors mortals have no words for—deeper than purple and richer than indigo. More luminous than polished gold. Stars hang low and heavy, close enough that one might reach out and pluck them from their celestial perches.

But I would never disrupt them in their slumber. Who knows what the Bright Gods would do if someone dared to disturb such peace.

The room itself reflects my latest adjustments; changes made to suit Maven’s current tastes while preserving elements she loved in happier lifetimes. The bed is enormous, its frame carved from wood that grows only in the deepest groves of the Otherworld, its surface piled with pillows and blankets in the grays and blacks she now favors. Gone are the bright colors she once delighted in—the vivid pinks and blues that made her clap her hands with unabashed joy when she first saw them.

That was millennia ago, in her third incarnation. She had been a weaver’s daughter then, her fingers skilled with thread and loom. I brought her silks in colors her people had never seen, and dripped with satisfaction as her eyes widened at the fabric that seemed to change hue with every movement.

“Are these magic?” she asked, wonder making her voice breathless.

“No,” I answered, watching the silk shimmer against her skin. “Just from a place beyond your knowing.”

She had been so close to saying yes that time. So close to accepting my offer to join me in my realm where such wonders would be commonplace rather than miraculous. But her father fell ill, and she could not bear to leave him. By the time death claimed him, her resolve had hardened once more.

My fingers graze the shelves that now line the chamber’s walls, filled with books from her various lifetimes. Poetry from her days as a scholar in Alexandria. Medical texts from her brief incarnation as a physician’s apprentice in medieval France. Novels from more recent lives, stories of people escaping circumstances as binding as her own.

A writing desk sits beneath the windows, its surface bare save for pens, ink, and pristine paper. Maven hasn’t written in this lifetime—hasn’t created anything beyond columns of numbers for faceless corporations and a few jagged lines on her skin—but the impulse lies dormant within her. In the Otherworld, with eternity stretching before her, perhaps she will rediscover that part of herself. I hope she will.

The recently painted walls have dried to a deep charcoal, a touch lighter than black, with subtle patterns that shift when observed from different angles. They reflect my realm’s nature—seemingly fixed but constantly in flux, governed by laws beyond those of Earth.

If she detests it, I will change everything. If she finds the room too dark or too large or too reminiscent of what she’s leaving behind, I will remake it in whatever image pleases her. If she despises our entire palace, I will build her a new one, stone by stone, with my own hands.