Page 64 of The Otherworld

In a day or so, I’m returning to the mainland, to my home. I’m leaving Orca behind. And I’ll likely never see her again.

What good can come of encouraging feelings between us?

She may not be able to intellectualize the concept of romance or love, but she possesses something more admirable than intellect: a heart brimming with purity of emotion.

She’s honesty. She’s grace. She’s even more of a mystery to me than I am to her. She is a forest so perfectly serene and untouched, I am torn between the desire to explore this new wonder of the world and the fear of polluting its holiness by so much as breathing on it.

My flesh pushes me one way; my conscience pulls me back. Alone in her father’s bedroom, failing miserably at sleeping, I find myself caught in a desperate tug-of-war between logic and emotion.

I can’t disrupt her life. I can’t upset the delicate equilibrium of her world. I won’t be the one to drive a wedge between her and her father. Not to mention, I’m way too old for her. She’s still a teenager, and I’m staring thirty in the face.

We can’t be destined for each other because everything is standing between us.

If fate is responsible for bringing us together, fate has miscalculated badly.

Still, I can’t deny my feelings. I can’t pretend the whole world doesn’t fall away when she looks into my eyes—and me with it, falling, falling, falling for her.

I can’t speak of it.

But I can’t hide it, either.

Too restless to hope for sleep, I push back my blankets and switch on the bedside lamp. My journal waits on the nightstand in a ring of tungsten light. Orca was reading it aloud after dinner, which would normally turn me into a mess of nerves and embarrassment. Yet, when she read my deepest thoughts aloud, her voice enshrouded the room in heavenly peace. Everything else ceased to exist, and I felt like I was being seen, truly seen, for the first time in my life.

Afterward, she passed the journal to me and begged me to read some Latin bits aloud. Her gaze made the pronunciation tangle stupidly over my tongue, and it didn’t come out the way I wanted, but she listened as though it was the best recitation of Latin she ever heard.

Now in the golden lamplight, I part the softened pages of my journal. The latest entry is not an entry at all, but two of the tiny pink flowers that fell out of Orca’s braid earlier. I found them on the floor and tucked them into my pocket. Now they lie pressed between the pages of the book, forever reminding me of the way she looked in the greenhouse this morning, talking to the orchids as a little blue butterfly danced around her head.

I press my eyes shut, drawing in a steady breath.

No.

Yes.

“Damn it,” I mutter, reaching for a pen on the nightstand. Before I know it, the tip is scrawling across a clean page, lines of ink flowing straight from my heart.

Untouchable beauty

Are you real or fantasy?

Lost to the world, yet found

by that which truly matters

Not a word passes your lips that isn’t

Honesty

Yet all I feel in the presence of your wild soul is

Mystery

All I feel is my own soul coming undone

What is the butterfly effect,

You ask me

I tell you what is true

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