Page 139 of Lotus

“Yes. You made a wish on the fireworks.”

A soft sigh kisses the bare stretch of my upper arm. “You remember?”

“The images are still a bit jumbled, but more details have breached the surface since my hypnotherapy sessions. I try to put the pictures to paper whenever I receive a clearer vision.” I add streaks of dark purple to one of the fireworks, recalling treetops sheathed in violet. “You wished for us.”

“You told me to write it down so it would come true.”

I don’t recall that particular part. “Did you?”

“Of course,” she grins, her voice cracking with nostalgic whimsy. “That’s why it came true.”

Smiling, I continue my picture, reveling in the feel of her warm breath dusting my skin. As I add more veins of color, Sydney reaches over and plucks the marker from between my fingers. There’s a playful light in her eyes, and I decide that I’ll color one of the fireworks that exact same shade of blue. If the color doesn’t exist, I’ll simply have to create it.

“Hold still,” she says.

I fidget when the felt tip of the marker glides along the inside of my forearm. “That tickles,” I say through a laugh. “What are you writing?”

“My wish.”

I sift amusedly through the assortment of markers and colored pencils with my opposite hand, trying to find the perfect color blue to match the stars in her eyes.

“There,” she whispers. “All done.”

The pop of the marker cap brings my attention back to her. I chuckle as I glance down at my arm, muttering, “Syd, you—”

Time freezes, and I go still. My words are eclipsed, my skin tingling. Sydney is speaking to me, but I can hardly hear her over my thunderous heartbeats.

My eyes dart to her confused face. “Why did you write that?”

“What?” She blinks, her smile dimming. “What’s wrong?”

A swallow grips my throat when I look down at my arm, the familiar word staring back at me:

l o t u s

“Syd, please tell me why you wrote this,” I plead, nearly choking on my words. “Why ‘lotus’? What does it mean?”

I feel frantic, utterly perplexed, my gaze shifting wildly between the woman I love and the word that has haunted me,guidedme, for over two long decades.

It was her.

All this time,shehad written it on my arm.

But why on earth didn’t she tell me?

And why is she looking at me like she has no idea what I’m even talking about?

“Oliver, I-I didn’t…” Sydney shakes her head, a frown pinching her brow. “I didn’t write ‘lotus’. I wrote…”

She gasps then, or maybe it’s a sob, a choked cry of wondrous disbelief muffled by her palm that shoots up and cups her mouth as her eyes widen with realization.

Sydney climbs over me, then gazes down at the letters from the opposite direction.

“Oh, my God…” she rasps out. “Oliver… I didn’t write ‘lotus’. You were looking at it upside-down.”

“What?” The word nearly catches in my throat as I blink, staring at the same scribbling I etched into a stone wall, knowing it meantsomething, knowing it was important somehow, but I didn’t understand it then.

And I only understand it now when Sydney picks up the marker from the mattress and rewrites it with a trembling hand, right-side-up.

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