Turning all the lights on in her room, she shifted her laptop. As the sun shifted, the best angle changed, but no matter how much she researched, her hands itched. She had to move. Had to try to build a golem, but the moment she did, the Compass would know that they had failed to erase her memory.
“Maybe I should take up witchcraft,” Jess murmured, running a hand through her hair.
She’d kept it short since the hospital. The texture remained fluffier than she had remembered, but it had been so long since she’d had short hair before that she couldn’t blame that on the outer dimensions. The uncertainty of her own body still made her ill if she considered it too carefully.
The dark words which the Compass last wrote upon her skin itched. Likely psychosomatic, but the urge remained no matter how much she tried to rationalize it away. Without them, she would have thought herself insane. A man in the mirror - an entire world, multiple words which defied physics. Which took science and reason and reduced them bit by bit into nothing. Any sane person might have called her story a flight of fancy, so keeping the mess to herself made sense, and lying got easier each day until people stopped asking.
In the afternoon, when no one else was at home, she closed her laptop and wandered downstairs. Undoubtedly, her shadow followed, but she couldn’t bear to look at him. Worse than mirrors, to see her shadow as the light stretched it left her lonely.
Grabbing the kettle, Jess brought it to the sink. As the tap ran - filling up the metal, she allowed her mind to drift into the closest she could to calm until the doorbell rang, and her entire body tensed.
Blood and pain and the burning of words assaulted her mind. Beneath her feet, the floor lurched, turning on top of itself.
“Deep breathes,” she reminded herself, turning off the water. “It’s just a doorbell.” She set down the kettle and flinched less when it rang a second time; however, the telephone quickly followed. Grabbing her cell, she answered without checking, “Hello?”
“Is this Jessica Gould?”
Standing in front of the door, Jess frowned. “This is she.”
“Fantastic!” the voice cheered. “This is Orpheus!”
“Orpheus?”
An instant knocking rapped at the door, and in the background on the phone, she heard someone murmuring before the voice, Orpheus, announced, “Oh, you knew me as Set.”
Her phone slipped from her hand, and she wrenched open the door, crying as her eyes landed on the man on the other side.
“Kilpeni…”
He smiled. Tears reflected in his eyes. “Jess.”
Leaping into his arms, she buried her face into his shoulder as she whispered, “You’re here. You’re real.”
His warm embrace eased the disquiet. Beneath her hand, his body radiated heat, and his pulse drumed steadily against her fingers, beating in sync with her own.
“I love you,” he whispered again and again into her dark hair.
Cradling his face in her hands, she pressed their foreheads together, laughing as both cried in relief. The kisses came softly. Presses - affirmations of life between them until she dragged him into the house.
There would be time to speak of the hows. Time enough to call back Orpheus. To congratulate Orpheus and Eurydice for claiming their happiness and plan trips to meet one another. More calls would come. Emails too. Every stone awakened in a body, but for now, Jess drew him inside her home, and curling about each other with legs entwined, they breathed the same air and recounted a thousand prayers in the whispers of the same three words given and taken back and forth between.
“I love you,” Jess murmured. Each kiss a period - an exclamation of her joy.
Kilpeni’s strong hands pressed against her back, holding her tightly to him as he swore, “I love you.”
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