Page 79 of Guarded Knight

I’ve never told anyone this story before apart from Freya because we got drunk one night when we first found out about each other’s diseases and it came out.

“By the time my mom came back up, I was agitated by the conversation and I’d started to cough a lot more. She pulled the curtain, and it was dark inside the little makeshift room, and I started crying.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows knit together.

“Everyone thinks I’m brave about it, about knowing I have this life limit. It’s like how people tell cancer patients they’re so brave, not realizing they cry in private all the time.”

He swallows thickly, and his jaw is tight.

“I’ve cried a lot about death. I just keep it to myself.

He lifts my chin so our gazes meet; his eyes are set on me with intention and the validation every human craves so deeply.

My heart folds under the weight of it. His steadiness. The way he listens to my every word in quiet devotion. Time separated us, and yet nothing has changed. He still comforts me like no one else can. There’s an invincibility I feel when I’m with him.

He makes me believe I could outrun my illness, even as every second with him reminds me how fragile my time really is. Like he holds back the clock with one hand and exposes every second with the other.

Am I really going to spend the rest of it without him in every day of it?

“What did your mom say?” he asks, waiting for it.

He knows my mom can be a kooky character and she’s the one I inherited ill-timed jokes from. She most certainly was emotional at the time. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hand trembled when she put it over mine. But the words she said were anythingbut a throwaway quip. They were, and still are, an anchor in the toughest storms.

“I asked my mom what she thought it would feel like to die. She said, for me, maybe it would be like drowning.” I laugh to myself. “I now know it wouldn’t be like that, but at the time, it made sense to eleven-year-old me. My lungs were always heavy as if filled with water. And she told me that drowning isn’t painful. It’s peaceful. She said it doesn’t hurt like other deaths. Somehow that made me feel calmer. To think it wouldn’t hurt.”

I can still smell the antiseptic and the scent of soap on my mother’s freshly washed hands when she stroked my hair with affection.

“She said, but Lara, you will never actually die. You will slip under the sea and become a mermaid. Your lungs will fill, and you will swim off into another world, quiet and beautiful and full of more wonder than you can even imagine.”

I’ve never told this story in part because it makes my fierce, caring mother sound as though she’s making light of something painful. But Gabriel respects her. Others might never understand how my mother framing my death as reincarnation into a magical world got me through so many panic attacks.

Gabriel knows how badly I need fairy tales to survive reality.

“That’s beautiful.” He barely gets the words out.

“It is.” I run my finger along his lip, and he kisses it.

My heart squeezes. “Even though these meds are amazing and it’s changed my outcome, I still think about death. Funny enough, I think about it when things are good and I want to cling to this world. But even now, when the panic hits, Iclose my eyes and imagine myself sinking down, watching the sunshine reflecting on the surface of a silent, peaceful ocean, and swimming away into another world.”

Gabriel’s eyes are glassy, and he clears his throat. “Does that work, to calm you?”

“It used to.”

“What changed?”

My heart stumbles. Energy radiates between us.

I cup his jaw. “Now I want to take someone with me.”

It feels reckless to admit, but I don’t look away. Not from him. Not from the way he’s watching me like I’ve just handed him something sacred.

“I’d follow you,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Into the deep.”

It’s not a promise. It’s a vow. And I believe him. Somehow I’ve always known Gabriel and I are bound, that space and time can’t tear us apart.

I know he’ll find me in whatever comes after this life. But will he walk beside me in this one?

I press my cheek onto his chest; if I open my mouth now, I’ll cry. So instead, I hold him tighter and pray that tonight stretches longer than any other. If I forget everything else, I want to remember the night I wasn’t afraid of death, only of losing him. And he told me I never would.