🌁 chapter eighteen: strong as death [let me be your ghost]

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” -Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“A cage went in search of a bird.”

-Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen

Author’s note: Heads up: this one’s 18+, no minors beyond this point, please. We have arrived at the open-door chapter. If you’re under 18, at work, or related to me — this is your stopping point. The full scene lives behind the paywall, where it can’t scandalize the algorithm.

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chapter eighteen // strong as death

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

There was a villa on the cliff edge, and it was the most beautiful set of rooms I have ever stood in.

We were still on Babylon—not planning on flying back that night, as neither of us were thinking of leaving then—and Eze led me through the spacious home with a terrace in the middle. But we didn’t stop to admire any of it. Eze pushed the bedroom door open, and I held back a gasp at the room beyond.

Floor-to-ceiling windows encircled the room, the fog wall burning rose-gold in the last light beyond them. A bed dressed in white linen, facing west. Lemons in a blue bowl. A bottle of crisp wine older than both of us, sweating on a table with two glasses, courtesy of Enzo, the island’s keeper.

The sea moved on every side of us, far below.

“This was built for me,” Eze said. “It was the villa modeled after the one he wanted me to live in back in his village, had we stayed in Italy and lived a simple life.” He gently let go of my hand, and went to pour two glasses of wine.

I stepped toward him as he pressed one of the stems into my hand, his fingers grazing mine a beat longer than the handoff needed, close but not fully touching, and there should have been awkwardness—there is always awkwardness, there is protocol even for this—but we had used ours out on the rocks. He knew what I was. I knew what he owned. Every lie either of us had was face-up on the table.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, but I wasn’t looking at the grand room or the panoramic windows. I was watching the man in front of me take a sip of a crisp white wine, the long line of his throat moving as he swallowed, the golden hues dancing off his sun-kissed skin.

“You are,” he said, and suddenly his glass was back on the table, and I set mine down as well. He shifted towards me with an intensity, and the air in the room changed pressure, and I felt it everywhere. My body was alight with anticipation, wanting him so desperately in ways I barely had the courage to name before.

“Wait,” I said, once, when his hands found my waist.

He waited. Instantly, completely—hands stilling, we were so close, his breath ragged but body gone patient as he let me lead—and that, the way he could hold a whole storm at a standstill because I’d asked, undid more of me than I thought it would.