Novel & Cerita Two Hundred Years Together

The vine on the corner building was two weeks into its bloom, at the point of fullest presence, the specific maximum of what it did each year before the doing began to taper and the having-been-done became the next year's preparation. I stood beside him. We looked at the city. "Twenty years," he said. "Not quite," I said. "The asking was eleven years ago. You asked for twenty." "Yes," he said. "Nine more years." "Yes," I said. He was quiet for a moment, the comfortable quiet of a man who had said the thing he needed to say and was now letting the saying settle into its proper position among all the other things that had been said in this particular relationship over eleven years.

I couldn't hear what was being said on the other end, but I saw the gentle smile that graced his lips. It was a smile I hadn't seen him direct at me in two hundred years.

The sixty years of silence. Still drawing people together. Still calling the network home. Two hundred years of patient certainty. The path has always known where it is going.

If I want to keep choosing this version of us. "Always," I tell him. And it's the only answer that matters. Not because it's romantic. But because it's true. After twenty years of knowing exactly what he's capable of. After twenty years of doing the work to transform. After twenty years of choosing him not because I had to but because I wanted to. I choose him again. He pulls me close and we stand there in the salt air with the ocean moving behind us and twenty years of shared life sitting between us like something solid and real.

"All of you? Together? Forever? Is that really what you're offering me?" "As long as you'll have us." Dev meets my eyes, serious and intense as always. "We know it's unconventional. We know people won't understand what we have. But we've been friends for twenty years. We know how to share. We know how to communicate. We know how to make something like this actually work." "And if it doesn't work? What happens to us then?" "Then we figure it out together." Banks shrugs his massive shoulders. "But we've wanted you too long to not try. All four of us. We've talked about this more than you know. For years, Aubrey."

She was telling me that the time for hiding was over. "The war lasted fifty years," she said. "Fifty years of blood and fire and death on both sides. Humans fought Lycans, and Lycans fought humans, and the land between the territories became a graveyard where nothing grew and nothing lived. The rivers ran red, the forests burned, and the villages that had once been full of life became nothing but ash and memory."

The A and the partial surname and the B and its cut beginning are still visible if you know what you are looking for. The fifty-year-old one is newer, the paper still cream rather than amber, the writing clearer. Both names removed. Both notations added. Fullbond. Ironveil. In two different hands. On the fifty-year-old one, below the notation, the four additional words. She will keep going. And on the back of the three-hundred-year-old one. She kept going. I stand between them. I look from one to the other. Three centuries between them. The same territory.

Observing. In two years… what would my relationship with Nathaniel be like?

Two years ago, a rogue wolf's bullet took my sight. The day I got it back, I couldn't wait to share the news with my Alpha mate Lucian. But outside the door, I overheard Lucian talking with his Beta. "Alpha, the Luna has been blind for two years. Just so you could be with your first love, you used a witch's potion to mask Silas's scent, and then you begged the Moon Goddess to tie her bond to him... Aren't you afraid the two of them will actually sleep together?" Alpha Lucian took a sip of his drink, his voice smug. "Silas has the best self-control of any wolf in the pack. Back in training, he could stay clear-headed even after he was drugged. "Besides, since Leona lost her eyes, she has had

For as long as it took. Because love wasn’t giving up when things got hard. Love was showing up. Every time. No matter what. And they’d been showing up for each other for twenty years. They weren’t stopping now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​