Page 72 of Ruled By Fate

The two of them stood for a moment in silence, each thinking of the disasters that lay behind them, each imagining the vast uncertainty that lay ahead.

After a few seconds, he cleared his throat. “I’ll stay,” he said again before hesitating. “Unless you want me to go.” He looked around the little house as though suddenly unsure. “You never chose any of this, and I don’t want to intrude on your life—”

“Of course I want you to stay.”

His whole body relaxed in relief. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, Cameron. I’m sure.” She took his hand. “I’d love to see your home. Someday. In the future, when I’m not in the middle of my work orientation. When I haven’t just moved across several states and been through more traumatic events in a week than most people see in a lifetime. When your people might actually have some answers for me, and I’ve had some time to wrap my head around the fact that I’d be voluntarily traveling to some crazy extra-dimensional celestial realm to meet your Old Testament father who never died.”

She took a deep breath. “But I know that this isn’t the right time. That will all have to come later. Because right now, all I want…”

He took a step closer, watching her closely. “Yes?”

She stared into his eyes. “…is a hot bath and a bowl of sour gummy worms.”

? ? ?

The bath was heaven. The gummy worms, unfortunately, never materialized.

Thirty minutes later, as she was toweling off, she caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror. At first, it didn’t register. Only when she did a double take, and then a third, did she let out a little cry. Cameron was there in an instant, bursting through the door on high alert.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

She was too stunned by what she saw to even be startled at the manner of his arrival or self-conscious about the fact she was wearing only a grey bath towel knotted up around her breasts.

She was staring at her chest. “My scar,” she murmured as though very far away.

She traced it with her finger. The jagged white line that she’d borne for five years was fading. No longer a raised, bold lightning strike distinctly marking her flesh, it had faded almost to the color of her skin and was flat and smooth beneath her fingertips.

Cameron looked at her, awestruck. “May I?”

She nodded vaguely, her eyes still trained on the mirror.

His fingertips traced the line, now barely perceptible.

“You were with me the day I got this scar,” she remembered.

He looked at her seriously. “I was.”

“Why is it healing now?”

He looked down at her pendant, hesitant to say.

“Oh.” She reached up automatically to touch it. “Of course.”

“Still.” He lifted a finger to touch it himself but again shied away just before contact. “I’m curious why it would start healing you now. It’s almost as if…”

She looked at him and froze. “As if what?”

He faltered another moment, then met her eyes. “It’s almost as if something has woken it up.”

Chapter Fifteen: Smart Phones Be Damned

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Cameron and Brie slept in the same bed that night. No kissing took place, no “bases” of any sort were reached; nothing at all happened that could be described with a crude sports metaphor. They just slept. He wrapped around her, and she spooned into the crescent of his body like two pieces of a puzzle fit together by nature itself.

There were no nightmares.

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