Page 65 of To Free a Soul (Duskwalker Beginnings #2)

When did the weightless shadows become comforting? When did Lindiwe begin seeing this place as her home? When did it start to feel safe and welcoming? When did she begin to feel those things, and more, about its owner? When... when... when?

These weren’t questions she could answer.

His onyx eyes, so inhuman and strange, once filled her with fear and dread. Like the piercing, unfeeling gaze of a god looking down on a mere mortal being. It felt like his pitch-black orbs would change her, corrupt her, break her.

She never expected that she’d one day find them... beautiful. They peered with such interest and curiosity, with such intensity and care, even if they lacked any perceptible emotion. They were keen and watchful, and Lindiwe had been sucked into those glossy pools of darkness many times over.

So when had she begun to look at him the same way, with curiosity, and see not his lacking exterior, but into his very cloud and find it ethereal?

Why was she here, now, half-awake in his realm, but unable to tear herself away from sleep because it meant facing reality? Why was she sore in the most wonderful way, tender in all the right places – as if her whole body had been worshipped – but it couldn’t overshadow how she was bleeding out?

Why does it have to hurt so much?

More than ever, her chest ached beyond recognition. There were wounds in places the eye couldn’t see, and no medicine or spell could heal. Her heart felt battered and bruised, like it’d been punched and jabbed at repeatedly.

And she had no one else to blame but herself.

Something brushed her cheek, perhaps the back of a knuckle or a claw. “Why are you crying, Lindiwe?”

Her eyes snapped open and she sat up. I’m... crying?

She didn’t even look at Weldir as she touched her cheek and peered down at her wet, tear-stained fingertips. Seeing them made her chest tighten, and more spilled over.

Lindiwe bit her lips shut, her vision blurred, and droplets began to drip off her nose and jaw.

I can cry like my children. Here, in this place, when they departed from her skin, they lifted off and floated around her face.

They didn’t glow, they didn’t look as pretty, but they hovered around so she could see the evidence of them so cruelly.

Lindiwe didn’t sob. There weren’t any whimpers. Her pain was so profound that her body didn’t know how to expel it other than to cry silently and listlessly.

“I... can’t do this anymore,” she whispered.

She thought sex would make her feel better, but the momentary numbness only made her feel worse. It made her reality sink deeper in and inform her that it was all... hopeless.

All the longing and yearning in the world wouldn’t change a thing. She was wishing for things she could never have, and the crater of yawning loneliness was only growing wider.

“Do what?” Weldir asked, his voice lovely, yet his tone so dull. “Sleep here?”

Holding her cloak to her chest to shield her nudity, thankful he’d covered her in it, she searched for her dress.

“I can’t be here anymore,” she told him, quietly and calmly to hide the fear and panic settling in. “I don’t want to be intimate anymore.”

“What?” Weldir asked as he followed her. “Why?”

Lindiwe threw her dress over her body, then threw her cloak around her shoulders. She swam for her underwear, tied one side, and then slipped it on to tie the other at her hip.

“I just don’t want to.”

“But you enjoyed yourself. A lot, if your moaning and pleading for more were any indication.” When she refused to look at him, her expression pinching in sadness, he came to her and placed a bent forefinger under her chin to make her meet his gaze. “Did I do something wrong?”

Before she could greet those captivating, glossy midnight eyes, she snapped her head away.

It was wonderful. He was being wonderful, and that was the problem. It was so good that I thought I was going to melt. Even now her body thrummed with satisfaction, singing from all the perfect touches, caresses, and thorough pounding.

Her lips trembled and her voice cracked when she said, “I don’t want to pretend anymore.”

Her pulse raced at that realisation, and it bled poison into her veins. Her skin was cold, but she was burning up, and she wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep so she didn’t have to deal with how she was feeling.

“Pretend? Lindiwe... I do not understand.”

Clenching her eyes shut and curling her hands into tight fists, she shouted. “Of course you don’t! What could an emotionless, heartless demi-god know about how a human would feel?!”

“I have done all I can to meet your expectations,” he answered, his tone finally holding some substance. Cold annoyance. “It’s unfair of you to state otherwise. I’m not devoid of emotions, as you so callously throw at me, and you know that.”

“But it’s not enough!” she yelled, finally tossing her head to the side to look at him.

She hated the way tears continued to fall, but her rage, the vengeance she felt for herself , for her bruised and battered heart, fuelled her forward.

“You react with anger because you think you have been wronged or disrespected. You experience desire because it is entertaining, because it gives you something to look forward to. You know sadness and sympathy because it is logical. Your loneliness comes from wanting to fill the utter emptiness around you.”

His expression didn’t flinch, but his mist did pull in tighter. “That is very true. I feel through my mind.”

“That is not true feeling! That’s a facade of the consciousness.

” She darted forward, incidentally making him pull back in surprise, until she placed her palm over the left side of his chest. Her fucking hand ghosted through him.

“You don’t have a beating heart. You don’t know what it feels like to have it bleeding out in your chest as you yearn for impossible things from an impossible being. ”

“I have tried for you. Is that not enough?” He created space between them and waved his clawed right hand through the air, as if to gesture to some unknown thing. “I have attempted to be a fitting mate.”

“Because logic tells you to! Because, as you once said, affection allows for a cohesive bond.”

Weldir growled as he shunted forward, his nose crinkling and finally showing an emotion. “I do care for you, Lindiwe. I have grown very fond of you over these years, and I have attempted to make that known.”

“I know that! I’m not a fucking idiot. But you experience it all the same way. Your anger, lust, affection, dedication, and care all come from the same place. It doesn’t exist within the real, living world.”

“It exists to me!” he roared.

“Because you are not real!” she screamed and pointed to the ether. “I don’t belong in your lifeless, lightless void! I can’t live here, and you can’t exist in my world, the living world.”

His tone became deflated and almost sounded... hurt. “That’s not fair, Lindiwe.”

It wasn’t fair. She also knew it wasn’t his fault.

I love you. I love you so much, and it pains me every single day because you can’t be with me.

Weldir couldn’t change. He couldn’t suddenly grow a body and join her, and that was heartbreaking.

She wanted it more than anything. She wanted to share her world with him, walk in it with him, holding his hand and feeling warmth in his touch as he felt the sun, air, and grass.

Smelt the trees, the dirt, and the flowers.

To experience what cold rain felt like on a hot summer’s day, or the sun warming him from the outside in on a winter’s morning.

Pretending that it was one day possible was slowly killing her. She yearned for it with every passing day of the thousands that they had distantly spent together.

And I can’t tell you that. There was utterly no point in telling Weldir that she somehow, foolishly, had fallen in love with him. That she wanted a proper life with him where he wasn’t in some faraway, unknown realm made up of shadowy, dark ether.

A cruel, lonely, and sad space just for him.

Lindiwe didn’t know if he loved her, if he could even experience the true, wonderful depth of it. If he did feel it in some semblance, then she didn’t want to know.

She didn’t want this to be even more painful than it already was. For her, and for him too.

Because she knew one thing for certain: love wasn’t supposed to hurt.

It could be saddening and frustrating. It could have moments of jealousy and possessiveness. It should always be filled with comfort, affection, and soft caresses. There would be fights, and there would be times of weakness and selfishness. There could be aches and pangs.

But it shouldn’t feel like this.

It shouldn’t feel like her heart was on fire and sending flames into her bloodstream. Her chest shouldn’t feel so tight she thought she was strangling on every breath.

It shouldn’t be this absent and lonely.

It shouldn’t feel this distant, where he could feel nothing and she had to feel for both of them for.

.. forever. Alone, and never truly sharing that sensual bond, something that Lindiwe craved every day with him, with no solution in sight.

Especially when he spent so much of their time slumbering and leaving her to experience every aching second of life.

I feel like I’m breaking into a million little pieces. And she kept leaving them behind for Weldir to hold onto, to cherish in his inhuman way. I can’t keep feeling this way.

It’d taken her nearly three hundred years to fall in love with this person, and she feared it would take twice as long to fall out of love with him.

They’d been intimate properly for only a hundred years of that time, and it had been sporadic but intense. Yet, he slept through seventy percent of their relationship, leaving her on her own, and she sat here... waiting for him. Always loyally waiting.

And she experienced every. Single. Second of those long years. Sad, lonely, and filled with longing for him.