“Are you all right, love?” He brushes a tangle of hair from my face.
I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure. Sometimes I think he has a touch of my sidhe-seer gift, he reads me so well. He’s known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing about me disturbs him, a rare gift from those who fully understand what I do. Few can lie to me. I sense their inner conflict, unless they suffer no guilt or scruple about anything, and I’ve been blessed to encounter only a handful of those in my life—all of them in or near Chester’s, recently. I don’t know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That’s my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion.
“What if I can’t do it?” I say. I don’t elaborate. With Sean few words are necessary. We’ve been finishing each other’s sentences since we were young. We were virgins when we made love the first time. There’s never been anyone else for either of us.
Now I have an invisible lover violating everything I hold dear. Making me want him and not my Sean.
He laughs. “Kat, sweetheart, you can do anything.”
My heart feels like a rock in my chest. I burn with shame, and deceit. I’ve made love in my dreams in exquisite detail with another man, and have done so every night for over a week. I’ve taken him in my mouth, felt him at the entrance of my womb, places that are Sean’s alone. “But what if I can’t? What if I make mistakes that cost lives?”
He rolls onto his side and pulls me back into him, spooning. I press in. We fit together perfectly. Like we were carved from the same piece of wood, from the same tree.
“Hush, sweet Kat. I’m here. I’ll always be here. Together we can do anything. You know that. Remember our vows.”
I pull his arms tighter around me. We were young, so young. Everything was simple then. We were fifteen, deliriously and passionately in love, delighted by our developing bodies, growing up together into one. We stole off to Paradise Point out by the lighthouse, dressed up like it was our wedding day, and took vows with each other. We came from broken families, temperamental fighting families, and we learned from watching them. Too much passion burns. Tenderness fuses. We knew what it took to stay together. It was nothing fancy. Common sense, really.
If you weaken, I’ll be strong. If you get lost, I’ll be your way home. If you despair, I’ll bring you joy. I will love you until the end of time.
“I love you, Sean O’Bannion. Never leave me.”
“Wild horses, Kat. Couldn’t drag me an inch. You’re the only one for me. Always.” There’s a smile in his voice.
We make love again, and this time, when dark wings try to shadow me, they fail. There’s no one else in bed with me but my Sean.
I watch him dress while dawn paints pale white rectangles around the heavy drapes. I have young charges at the abbey and we are not wed. We’d begun making plans to marry before the walls fell but our families interfered. The O’Bannions tried to stop it. When they realized Sean was having none of it, they tried to take over and turn it into the spectacle of the decade.
An O’Bannion marries a McLaughlin!
It would have been a grand step up for my family. We were small-time criminals. His family controlled nearly all Dublin’s mob underbelly. I grew up with Sean because my mother was his nanny.
We’d been fighting bitterly with our parents for months before the walls fell and billions died.
Including our families. Where else would they have been than out in the riots, watching the chaos, trying to profit from the lawlessness?
I can’t pretend that I’m sorry for their deaths, and I won’t feel ashamed that I’m not. The only deaths I rue are those of my two half brothers that survived the fall, only to be killed by Shades. Rowena didn’t teach us about eating Unseelie in time for me to save them. My parents and other siblings were corrupt to the core. Sometimes people are born into the wrong family. Sean and I turned our backs on them years ago. But our families never stopped pressuring us and never accepted letting us go. I used to worry so much about what they would do to Sean, how they might try to force him into the family ways, but now such worries are a thing of the past.
It’s today and we’re free!
As soon as we get a quiet moment, and a priest, we plan to wed. Some of the girls are hoping we’ll decide to make a lovely ceremony of it here at the abbey. A wedding in times like these can be an uplifting thing, but I’ll not make my wedding into something for another. It’s between Sean and God and me.