Page 117 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

He had not told her he had lost his family. He’d saideveryone. Because it had been. Everyone he’d cared for. Everyone he should have protected. But she knew all the same. Knew it was his own flesh and blood he’d failed, because she recognised in him what lived in her. The effects of severing a blood connection. Specifically with a sibling.

And he knew what it would ultimately do to her. That loss. It would hollow her out. And the fire he saw burn inside her would be extinguished. Her desire to shove all the pain, all the darkness into the night sky and fill that place where the pain had been, with hope, with light, would die inside her.

As it had died inside him.

‘Why not here?’ he asked.

‘You came here so you didn’t have to be alone, and you retreated to the gardens when it got too much. When you were surrounded by too many people who wouldn’t understand. But I understand. I’m not the wrong person for you to be with tonight. You’re not the wrong man for me to…kiss.’

His heart hammered.

‘You understand me,’ she said. ‘And we found each other.’

‘To find something means it was lost to you,’ he told her harshly. Too harshly. ‘I wasn’t yours to find. I did not seek you out.’

His brain hiccupped, because he had, hadn’t he? Revealed himself to her when he didn’t have to?

He could have plugged his ears with his fingers. Shut his eyes. Turned away from the vision, this woman who was like a garden of wild flowers, calling to him, singing his name.

But he hadn’t.

‘We did not find each other,’ he hissed, because she made it sound romantic. As if tonight had happened on purpose. As if their meeting had been fate.

‘But we did,’ she corrected him.

‘This isn’t a fairy tale,’ he told her. ‘This is not destiny.’

‘Isn’t it?’

A drop of rain fell then, a single splash on her blue-and-gold mask adorned cheek. Would her legs become a tail now as she got wet? Would the rain return her home? His thumb itched to swipe the drop away. To pretend the heavens wouldn’t open tonight and take her.

He was too fanciful tonight. Too nostalgic. Too something akin to caring.

He was not himself.

‘We are passing ships in the night. Nothing more,’ he said, his voice too deep, too breathy, lacking in assurance. Beneath the words rang a question he didn’t want to acknowledge, let alone hear the answer to.

He’d make them true. His words. She would not make a liar of him.

‘But we haven’t passed yet,’ she said. ‘We are still here, anchored. And tonight could be more than fleeting, for both of us. If we let it be,’ she declared.

She teased him with what she held back, with what shedidn’tsay.

‘Explain,’ he said.

He wanted to know why tonight he was here with her, and not face-down, drunk, from the bottles of alcohol he’d taken from a passing server and placed next to the stone bench inside the colonnade. They were untouched.

She knotted her hands, wrung them at her waist. ‘We’re both virgins,’ she said quietly, and again the blush took her. Spread across her cheeks.

‘What does that have to do with anything?’

‘Everything,’ she breathed.

She stood tall, all five feet of her, against the silence that hummed between them in this place of walls and weeds.

‘I’m your awakening,’ she declared. ‘And you are mine.’

Laughter spilt from his lips. It was not to mock her, but himself, and the thoughts this creature took from his mind without his permission. Because so close were her words to what he knew she was now. A creature sent to taunt him tonight with all he’d denied himself for twenty-five years.