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

by Nicole Fiorina

“I’ll always want only you,” I finally said out loud, not a whisper. Not a whisper at all. “It will always be only you for me. And that will never change.”

“I’ll always choose you. In every story,” he said out loud, not a whisper. Not a whisper at all. “That will never change.”

A tragedy indeed, to finally be loved by someone, and having no choice but to walk away from it. In the end, she was fated to belong to another, and I was doomed to watch from a distance.

I’d fallen in love, and Kane would argue how love was a lie. I’d fallen in love, and Cyrus would argue how love made us weak. I’d fallen in love, and my old self would argue how love was a fairytale. I’d fallen in love, and Stone would probably call it art.

I didn’t realize how far I had fallen until I came up for air, and you weren’t there.

I wrote the story of how the siren fell in love with the heathen, but love was never enough for them to have their three-word fairytale. Consequences would always stand in our way, and in the end, love would always spill blood.

“We can be together for eternity, whether it be in Weeping Hollow, the afterlife, or on this earth again.” “Oh my god,” poured out of me in a broken whisper. Stone tucked my hair behind my ears, continuing, “Over a hundred years were thrown between us, and I still found you, and I’ll keep finding you. I will always find 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, in a single flashing moment ... and I’m in love with you always, my darling ... Do you hear me?”

“Because I’ve felt nothing but anger and hate inside me, and for the first time ever in my life, I imagined a future, a marriage, children, a life. And I only see it with him ... because he makes me so happy,” I cried. “And I want that, Ivy. I want that so badly with him.”

The chapters were not only facets of their love story, but pieces of a deadly mystery conjured from intense grief, heart-searing pain, and throats full of rage that had been passed down from generation to generation.

“No, I want to know something. While you were busy fucking him, and falling in love with him, and marrying him, and I was busy building a life for us, did it ever occur to you how selfish this was? Did you ever once think about what this would do to me?”

These were all decisions that brought me here. This was a mess of my own doing. I ... loved and in every direction love led me in, it hurt and it was wrong. Because I loved Mom, I’d manipulated Kane all these years by having sex with him, and it made me disgusted with myself. Because I loved Lena, I’d helped end her life, and I was the one who must bear the look in her eyes each time she died in my mind. Because I loved Cyrus, it hurt to love Stone, and because I loved Stone, I was sitting in this chair so no one would hurt him. Maybe I loved wrong all along. “I thought I’d be strong enough to go through this life without you,” I whispered as though Stone was in the room with me. “But look,” my whisper cracked, and I shrugged. “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and I’m falling apart. How am I supposed to last another sixty years?” I

Bone Island was like opening our book, and forcing myself to re-read the chapters we’d already written, then leaving our book unfinished.

“I believe it to be true for happiness, too. That perhaps you won’t feel it today, or tomorrow, or even the day after that, but it will hit you when you least expect it. And when it comes, I don’t want you to feel guilty about it. I want you to let it happen. Because the more good moments, happy memories, and smiles you have, the easier it will be for pain to fade. Then one morning you’ll wake up, and you’ll think of me, and it won’t hurt anymore. You’ll think of me and smile, not cry.

“This time, I don’t want to be forgotten. So, I want you to have children so you can tell them about us, and how we fell in love, all right? A cautionary tale that echoes into eternity.”

Coffee has a last sip. A song has a final note. A great story has a last page. Nothing can stop it. The sun sets, people die, you read the final chapter, you say goodbye. You move on. But, if loud enough, if felt deeply enough, if this moment or person was so significant and changed your life, they became a part of you. You feel them floating on a melody, sewn into a breeze, laced in a scent, or brought to life by words on a page. No one needs magic to remember them or feel them. They’ve already imprinted themselves. The nostalgic stamps that keep us grounded. Our lighthouse beams to keep us moving forward. Love is eternal, after all.

We’d always known this was how it was going to end for us. We would spend the rest of our lives living on barely caught glances, but I was so grateful for these glances. Just seeing him would be enough until we could be together. Villains we’ve become, after all. Villains of our own hearts.

You read me the book you could never read alone, which happened to be my hundredth, and I watched you dance to a song about having no regrets, over and over. Two strangers frolicking as lovers, whispering secrets, telling stories, coalescing in the night, rooting to each other in all ways to escape the cruel realities surrounding us. You gave me my smile and laugh, and I gave you all I had left. And the way you touched me was equally passionate and gentle, writing a story on my skin where a scarred monster like me could be adored by a woman like you.

For a while, we pretended. For a while, I was the kind of man you could have chosen in the end, and you weren’t the angry, forbidden girl. We clung to merciful lies to hide from harsh truths. We unleashed our dark sides, screamed our pain, and skinned ourselves raw to let the other in. Then it was frightening because we were falling even though we said we weren’t, and we hurt anyone standing in our way, even each other. We resisted all belief, seduced fate, and sinned in the name of love. Our hearts were never on the table, my darling, because we’d thrown them at each other—you, angrily, and me, desperately. All this time, we kept rewriting our tragic story, desperate to change our bitter end. And what has saved us? Our hearts were so tangled it was hard to know who was holding who too tight. We have a love that outlasts love.