Her whole life changed from that moment forward. In the years to come, regardless of everything else, she would return to those days that seemed so brief yet filled an eternity of memories for her. Every glance and gesture, every smile and laugh, swelled within her reminding her of love and all it could be, all that it would forever be.
In the morning, he told her to come with him.
“Stay here.”
He laughed and she tried to capture that moment in time. Lock it within her. His smile as he lay beside her. The echo of his voice off the walls of the cave. The blushing sunlight and the darkness of the cave. The breeze and the trees, the sweat and the moss.
“Come on.” He rolled away from her and then reached for her, helped her to her feet. His grip loosened on hers but she held it tight and they walked hand in hand from the cave for the first time but not the last time.
She would remember every moment when their skin touched.
“Early mornings,” he said, “are always best. There’s something wondrous about the rising of the sun before it burns away the dew and the fog.”
“Where we going?”
He smiled, as if he had a secret, as if anything on her island could be secret from her. He said, “Not a where.”
She laughed. “What?”
“Patience, my dear.”
My dear.
She forgot the trees they passed, the shadows cast, the sun and the blue sky, the moon still peering through the gauze of night, the cool dewstroked stones and the seabreeze. It was as if she floated away, past her body and into the heavens, past the domain of men and even past the god’s vaulted ceilings to that primordial space before everything. The wine dark sea of eternity, the vast chaos of everything.
At the same time, she fell deeper into her body as if she were finally mortal, like him. Bound to skin and meat and blood and stone and dirt and dust, imbued with fire but not of the fire. A spark. A light.
This was why the gods hounded humanity. Why they wore their skins and playacted as one of them. The ephemeral acts, these simple touches, weighed so much more than the centuries and millennia with each other.
Unchanged and unchangeable. The gods would forever be who and what they were.
But man.
Fire. A spark. Lightning. These flashes of brilliance became mundane for the gods, caused by their casual indifference or delights. But then she saw how her man sometimes jolted from the storm, from the rage of the skies, how the earth shaking caused him to tremble in terror, how a bird catching wind filled him with delight and how that smile blazed brighter than any day in all her life before him.
I will remember you, she told herself in that moment, their hands clasped, and she reminded herself of this same prayer a thousand times. For even as she luxuriated in his presence, his attention, she knew it could not last.
Such are men.
How easy they break and collapse and fall to dust.
I will remember you.
“Just here.”
His voice roped her back to the moment rather than the wide spectrum of possibilities and realities just past her fingertips. In her reverie, she nearly dipped into that cascade of lives where none should go if they valued their sanity or self.
She blinked, her eyes on him, watching him. Studying him.
He glanced at her, saw how she watched him, laughed shyly—how she loved that, the way his performance of self broke for her—and nodded his head, showing her where to look.
Turning, she felt his own eyes on her. Felt how he watched her. How he studied her. It forced her to split her attention in half for she could not give up on the sensation, the memory, the experience of his attention fixed upon her.
With what remained of her attention, she took in what he came to show her and she could not see what he wanted her to see but she took in the foxes rising from their den to chatter and prowl and the birds winging across the sky and those few gulls who seemed fixed in place by the strong winds as they hunted the fish beneath the skin of the water and the waves rolled in as they always did, as they always had, as they always would, and she tried to see them as if she had not authored this place, as if she did not know every moment of this place, as if she could be someone who had never been here, had never seen or heard or touched her island, and she found that she could not.
Her imagination, like all immortals, was limited. Nearly fixed to their nature. But she did not want to disappoint him. Did not want him to know that she could not be surprised by what she’d made. And so she did what she believed was among the most human things she’d ever done and she let her jaw fall open and then covered it with her hand while squeezing his hand tightly.
“It’s beautiful.”
She nodded. “Like nothing I’ve seen before.”
He smiled at that and told her to follow him again but led her by the hand.
Over the following week, he showed her the island she’d made from nothing and filled her in on all the beauty he’d discovered there. She gasped and smiled and behaved astonished and delighted at all the right moments.
All the while, he watched her the way she had watched him. She knew it. Could feel it. And so it was easy to show her awe and surprise and delight for this turn in his feeling towards her was so sudden and so great.
He was a man. Only a man. But he took such simple delights in the world that it nearly made her forget the year he’d spent weeping and isolating himself.
But, no, she could not forget. Could not wash away those hurts.
But this transformed them. They could not be forgotten but this was something more powerful: healing.
His attention and affection healed her. Consoled her. Rebuilt her by granting her a new life. Stepping away from her pain and isolation into this new realm with him, where every day was glorious, where every memory shined.
Each evening, she sang to him and he fell into her, spending himself so long as she cajoled him along, his ardor rising at her prompting, at her singing, at her touching. She studied the way he strained to please her, the way he grit his teeth, his tentative touches as if afraid that she might reject him or ever utter a no.
In the mornings, he led her again to some place of her creation and showed her why it was beautiful, what made it unique, perfect.
That idea began to condense and then crystalize within her: perfection.
For all that she had seen, for all that she had lived, for all the effort she’d spent creating her island, her entire hidden world, she discovered that perfection was not something you built or tied down or locked in permanence, like the tide or the sun or the stars or the breeze or the stone and the bones of the earth. Rather, it was the transience that made it so. Every impermanent moment with him granted her a view of perfection.
She tasted it. Savored it.
But she no longer tried to grasp hold of it. No longer attempted to preserve it.
With him, she didn’t need to force anything. His every look, every touch, the scent of him, the warmth of his regard and his body, the taste of him, the sound of his voice, of his impassioned grunting, of the words that dripped from his mouth while he lay dreaming, those incomprehensible utterances echoing the horrors of a life he fled.
He was so like her. Mirrors of one another.
And like mirrors, he watched her as she had watched him. They made a study of one another even as they built a new place, a new kind of existence on this island that existed only because of her.
And now because of him too.
For she would give it all away if she could not have him.
What would life be worth without him here beside her?
“What’s beyond your shores?”
“The rest of the world.”
“No, I know. I mean, what leads one here? How did you get here?”
“How did you get here?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know how to make you fully understand.”
“Try and I’ll follow.”
“Beyond here is everything else. But this place is separate. It does not exist for those beyond here and they don’t exist for us within here. Even were a ship to travel within sight, we would not see it. They would not see us.”
“What if they did? What if we did?”
“Then they would have found the way to follow us.”
“How did I get here?”
“I do not know. I cannot know. Only you can know that.”
“I was so full of terror and pain that I do not know. I cannot remember. There was only the will and desire for life. To live.”
“Who did you lose?”
“Everyone.”
“Tell me.”
“Not yet.”
“Whenever you’re ready. It will help. It may even soothe you. You must exorcise your demons and your past. It’s the only way forward.”
“The only way through is down.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s nothing.”
The weight of his regard was tactile as well as spiritual. It brushed against her skin like a gale but also soaked up all her attention and focus. For who would she be without him and what would all this matter without him?
And he gave to her. He smiled and laughed.
It was enough.
But he would not reveal himself to her, would tell her nothing of himself. All she knew of his life before he came to her was learned in their first hours together. When she tried to return to those moments, he rebuffed her and told her that it didn’t matter, or he changed the subject to something that he could not know.
That no man could know.
He wanted to know of the seas and the stars. His attention both farflung and minute. He spent a week studying the flight of the bees and asking her why and what and where and how. He wanted to know everything. More than anything, he longed to understand.
“I don’t know,” she said so often that it became a sort of joke between them.
“But how can you not know? You made this place. It all exists because of you.”
She shrugged. “I do not know how to make you understand. So much of this is not conscious effort. It’s almost reflexive or…imagine if you found a wheel. Would you consider how it was made or would you simply use it?”
He shook his head. “There must be something more. These are living creatures. You must know something of how they fly or why they dance from flower to flower.”
“Do you know how you breathe?” She shrugged again. “It’s like that for me.”
He sucked in a breath, expanding his chest, then let it out. “Of course I know how to breathe. I can choose to breathe or not to.”
“Even when asleep?”
His brow furrowed. “Perhaps a habit. Without breath, we die, and so we learn the habit as well as the act. I understand it, though. Even if I do it without effort, I still know how and why.”
“Your heart then.”
He only looked at her.
“Do you choose to make it beat? Can you even choose how fast or slow? I have numbered your heartbeats while at rest and in passion. I can—”
“I understand it though.”
“And what of the rest of your heart? Do you choose who to love? How to love them? Did you choose any of this?”
He sucked in a breath and spoke such sweet words to her so quietly and with such passion and strength. “I chose none of this.”
And tears sprang to her eyes and she sang to him and he watched her with such intensity that she knew he belonged to her, that he would forever belong to her.