An exquisite rose gold wristwatch with a camel-colored leather band. I take it out of the box with shaking hands and examine it.
“Turn it over,” he says.
I do, and I see that he’s had the back engraved. It says, “love and eternity, Myles.”
“It’s beautiful,” I tell him.
“So are you,” he tells me. “You’ll be beautiful forever. Stella Rose gold for eternity.”
“Is this the last time I’ll ever see you?” I ask.
He winces. “Yes.”
I let him help me put the wristwatch on. “Then can we watch the stars a little longer? I want you to show me exactly where you’re going. Maybe we can make it a late night.”
He agrees, and we make it a very late night that extends into the early morning hours. Then he has to go, and I have to say goodbye for the final time.
I tell him I’ll never stop loving him, and the last thing he says to me before he leaves me in tears is, “This is how it was supposed to be, Stella. You and me. I love you, too. I’ll never stop.”
And I will never get over him.
EPILOGUE
FOSTER
One thing I’m never going to understand is Myles’s relationship with Stella Dellucci. First, because Stella is looooong gone. Second, because they broke up over five hundred years ago.
Third, because if he’d open his damn eyes, he’d see that there’s a far more accessible, far less confusing woman right in front of him, practically holding up a neon flashing sign that says, “I have been crushing on you for half a millennium.”
But he’s still stuck on a girl he only knew for twelve years back on Earth.
Five hundred years versus twelve.
And if you ask me, Lizzy Dupree is about a million times prettier than Stella. I mean, sure, there was something beautiful and almost ethereal about Stella, but Lizzy is cute and touchable, and all the rest of the guys on the ship and several of the women and all our three gender nonconformists agree that Lizzy is the most attractive woman any of us have ever met.
Hell, some of us can even vouch for her skills in bed. Which is not to say that Lizzy is slutty or anything. When you’re with the same group of a hundred people for thousands of years, relationships get casual. Myles Kayes and Anna Dupree (Lizzy’s very hard to get to know sister) are probably the only celibate people on board.
Myles has hen duty tonight—which is what we call guarding the drawers of thousands of cryogenically frozen embryos that we will be responsible for hatching once we get to our destination planet, Kepler—but I see Lizzy after dinner for our weekly game of Cards Against the Universe. It is a drinking game. Don’t judge unless you’ve been on a thousand-year trip into space, thank you very much.
“Hey Fost,” Lizzy says when I sit down at the table. “Are we there yet?”
This is Lizzy’s favorite inside joke with me, because for the whole first century on the ship, whenever someone caught me talking in my sleep, I would be dreaming that I was in a car that was going to get to its destination in a few hours and asking the driver, “are we there yet?”
I check my wrist like I have a watch on (even though none of us wear watches), just like I do every time she makes this joke. After some real consideration, I say, “Sorry, Liz. Not for another couple hundred years.”
She laughs like she’s totally delighted because Lizzy’s the kind of person who can find delight in an inside joke over and over, year after year. Never gets old for her.
I sit down, and we play. The crew loves this game, and when we get bored, we create expansion packs for ourselves. Why not, right? There are only so many skills you can master, so many classes you can take, so many times you can avert a disastrous collision with an asteroid, and not need some stupid way to blow off steam.
“Myles on hen duty tonight?” Lizzy asks after we’ve been playing and drinking for about an hour.
“Yep,” I tell her.
“Who’s with him?”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Oh no, seriously? Myles and Anna again?” Lizzy hates it when Myles hangs out with her sister alone because even though neither Myles nor Anna talks much, it seems like when they talk together, they always come out of the conversation in an existential funk that lasts both for days.
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as last time.”
“Maybe it’ll be worse.” Lizzy throws her cards down on the table. “Foster, can you tell me one more time why Myles is such a downer? Is it really all about this one girl? She’s gone! How much longer do we have to mourn her? I mean, you don’t see me sitting here lamenting the boyfriends I left behind on Earth. And you’re not crying over … what was her name? Grazie Patel-Compton.”
She knows Grazie’s name very well. And I have the feeling that none of Lizzy’s Earth boyfriends ever meant anything to her. She’s just complaining to vent. But I play along. After all, I also have the feeling that Myles means everything to her, and I know how misguided that is.
“Because I broke up with Grazie,” I tell Lizzy. “And Myles can’t help it. He never got to see Stella die. In his mind, she’s still living back on Earth.”
“Ugh,” Lizzy says like she’s exasperated. “I think I’m just done with Myles.” (She isn’t.) “When is he going to wake up and smell the roses?” (He isn’t.) “The world isn’t perfect. Life changes. We don’t get to decide how. We all just have to carry on and deal with what we’re given the best we can. There’s no sense in hanging on to the stuff that hurt us in the past.”
“Well, I encourage you to tell him that again, Liz,” I say. “And my money on our bet doubles if you can get him to sleep with you.”
She tosses her hair back. “One day, Foster. One day.”
“One day a thousand years from now on Kepler, you mean,” I say.
“Whatever it takes. Some things are worth waiting for.”
“I think he would agree with that.”
I know it’s true, and that is why there is one secret I’ve never told Myles. It's something Stella told me the night before we left.
Turns out, our sweet friend Stella was doing everything she could to figure out how to take the Immortality Virus before she died. In fact, she was applying for a grant to fund a research program targeted at studying the success rate of patients with Early Aggressive Alzheimer’s after being given the Immortality Virus late in life. When we left, she only needed a little more funding, because some generous, anonymous donor contributed oodles of money to her research before he died.
I see Myles briefly tonight after he’s done with hen duty. He looks miserable. I know what this means. He spent three hours talking to Anna Dupree, then left hen duty to take a walk on the outer deck.
He’s been out there looking at the stars.
I like Lizzy Dupree. She is in love with Myles, and she would be the much much better choice for him. At the very least, I’d like him to understand that immortal relationships aren’t the same as mortal ones. It would be okay for him to love Lizzy back for a little while. Or maybe even for a thousand years or so. He wouldn’t be betraying Stella with that. If anything, he’s betraying Lizzy right now. Because I think Myles does care about her. He does things, reacts to her in ways you only react to someone who matters. And time is limited, even when you are immortal, so he is wasting the time he should have spent being in love with Lizzy.
I am Team Lizzy for the foreseeable future.
But if Stella is alive, then she is end game, and I have to admit, I’m Team Stella for that. I am especially Team Stella End Game when I see Myles come back from a walk on the outer deck. He won’t let her go until he is back on Earth, standing in front of her tombstone.
Still. Maybe. Just maybe …
I’m only religious on Myles’s behalf, but I send a prayer out to the universe for him before I go to sleep. I hope Stella found a way to become immortal, and I hope one day, thousands and thousands of years from now after we’ve done our job on Kepler and returned to Earth, Stel
la and Myles reunite.
Call me optimistic, but I like a good happily ever after, and I don’t believe their story is over yet.
THE END. (FOR NOW.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I self-publish my books under my own independent publishing house, Mortal Ink Press, LLC. I use a number of resources as an indie publisher, including Scrivener, FlatIcon, FreePik, Adobe InDesign, Calibre, Affinity Designer, Grammarly, Shutterstock, and so on. My cover was designed by Danielle Doolittle at DoElle Designs (check out her facebook page here!). Danielle is great, and I highly recommend her! I write locally with the Raleigh Pubwriters and virtually with Word Stitch Write Ins. Look either of these groups up online, and you can write with me, too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra L. Vasher is an indie writer, recovering lawyer, dreamer, consultant, blogger, serial entrepreneur, and mommy of very spoiled dog. She enjoys long drives in fall weather, do-it-yourself projects, animated movies and cartoons, fanfiction, red wine, traveling everywhere, and baking sweet and savory treats. She can often be found trying not to hunch over her computer at her favorite coffee shops in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Also by Sandra L. Vasher
The Immortal Mistakes
Stella Rose Gold for Eternity (this book!)
Lizzy Dupree and the Thousand-Year Crush
Mila Hildebrand is Forever Not Yours (coming spring/summer 2020)
The Mortal Heritance
Sisters of the Perilous Heart (coming May 5, 2020)
Kingdoms of the Frozen Dead (coming in 2021)
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