Bone Island: Book of Danvers (Tales of Weeping Hollow, #2)

by Nicole Fiorina

“Listen,” he rasped with a voice on the edge of breaking. “What if I told you that centuries were supposed to separate us, that time was designed to stand in our way? What if I told you that every second together is measured by the impossible because the chance of you and me was never supposed to happen?” He paused. He breathed in. He breathed out. “We were never supposed to find each other, but we did. You found me, and then you saw me, and it seems you’ve somehow made these two words entirely different.”

It was her soft heart and her hard head, her dignity and her abandon, her wild and her calm, her contentment and her hunger for freedom. I was holding all of her, and she was holding all of me, folding up my paper heart and cramming it next to hers.

Stone looked away with a hardened expression, his hands still on my shoulders. “You’re a coward,” he edged out, letting me go. “Just when things become real, you fold into yourself. You keep these fantasies of you and me together safe inside your head, and once you’re face to face with the freedom you wish to sail away on, you can’t break the glass.”

I glanced back at Circe as she pulled away from the kiss. She raised her chin and looked about the room. And her gaze slammed into mine. Famous poets and writers have written about this moment of two people locking eyes from across the room. For some, it was a slow song of nostalgic poetry—an awakening from a long slumber. For me, it was an attack of evocative prose.

Sometimes I’ve wondered if the sad poets before me sat at their desks in the corner of a dreary room, wishing that their sorrow would one day inspire. And it was possible, I could imagine, the writers had known all along, willing to bear and bleed for the sake of future generations of the broken-hearted, their poetry the only remedy.

“No, you don’t have to do anything,” he said. “You’re the author. I’m just the blank pages you whisper your secrets to, then the thing you crumble and toss to the side. I’m the book in the palm of your hands. In the end, this story is yours. You can write it whichever way you want.”

“Adora,” he whispered, his breath coming out much smoother than my own. “I am yours ... and you are mine ... and only mine. You cannot be fated for him ... I don’t believe it ... not when ... each day that passes by without you, it feels like you are missing from me.”

“I’ve tried to stop thinking about you. And I can’t,” he continued, voice torn, chest rising full and falling hard. “I’m terrified of how far I would go to keep you ... and the things I would do for just another second alone with you ... and that I’ll never be able to stop myself when it comes to you.”

“What I feel for you knows no time or place,” he whispered, his warm words ruffling my hair. “My love for you awakened without warning, slowly and in an instant, in one throbbing heartbeat ... and I’m in love with you always, my darling ... Do you hear me?”