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Do I feel sorry?

“I’m just…” I took up but was unable to finish the sentence.

What the fuck do I feel?

“I don’t want to have to choose between hockey and the love of my life, Jules! This isn’t fair!” I raged, stomping across the yard to get even further away from him.

It took me a few minutes to calm down enough to look at Jules again. His youthful face betrayed nothing but pure shock.

I hated it. I despised how perfect he looked. And how young. And how he wasted his days with me, a puny human! My life wasnothingcompared to his. It was the blink of an eye and would be over before I knew it.

It scared me. I would look at him in seventy years and he would still be his beautiful self. And I? I’d die. Jules would go back to his routine. Time would take the memory of me away from him until he forgot I had ever existed.

“Nikolai?” His voice was gentle, way too gentle. I wanted him to rage like the storm inside me. Why was he so calm? Had he already accepted that we were only a brief interlude in the grand scheme of things?

“Please let me hold you.”

It was such a simple request, yet it broke me. I let out a wail of despair, a sound unlike any I had ever made before.

“You can’t make me,” I gasped. “You—I can’t lose you.”

Without another word, Jules wrapped me in his arms. He was shorter than me, lithe, and breakable. But in that moment, he was the pillar that held up my world.

For a long time, he swayed me on the spot, stroking my hair and my back, and just let me work through my feelings.

Once the storm had passed, I felt numb, but weirdly calm, too.

It was as if I’d had a poisonous thorn pulled from my body. I straightened up and loosened his hold on me.

“You will not lose me. I am ageless, Bunny.” Jules brushed the hair off my face and gently pulled me back into his arms.

“Ageless? How?” I spoke softly so he could pretend not to hear me. Jules had never just ignored my questions or musings the way everyone had done for all my life.

Then it was he who backed away.

“I am everything at the same time. A young boy, the old man you met out on the path, this, and everything in between.” His face flickered with different versions of him, there one second and gone before I could take a closer look. Then he resembledmyJules again.

“So you cannot die?” My face burrowed into the crook of his neck, inhaling his mossy scent to ground myself.

“I don’t know.” Jules sounded amused. “I’ve never tried.”

I chuckled reluctantly.

“Oh, Bunny. If I can, though, I want you to go first. I wouldn’t want you to be sad about me. And you must know that I will follow you into the dark. I will follow you anywhere.”

“Hey, I hope I have at least half a dozen decades left.” It was hard to keep a note of indignity out of my voice.

His hand wrapped around my throat, pushing up my chin to make me look at him. His eyes were soft and warm like a spot of moss in the sunlight.

“Whenever, my sweet. Whenever.”

When Jules kissed me, the world stopped spinning. Everything came to a halt and nothing mattered to me but him.

A groan echoed between us as I ran my fingers through his hair and tightened my grip on him. I tilted his head slightly to give us a better angle, then ran my tongue across his lips. He followed my lead willingly. And every time he did, it baffled me.

That this ancient creature even bothered to look at me was crazy. Letting me kiss his lips and touch him and allowing me to do what I wanted? That was more than I ever expected.

Jules hummed. His hand left my throat, and he hugged me even closer to his body. His fingers dragged down my back to just above my ass. That was all it took to change the tone of the kiss.