I start to reach for the journal, then change my mind. “I have no plan. I have no idea if this is really even happening. I have no clue what tomorrow will bri
ng. But I do know I don’t plan to disappear, Princess,” I tell her, watching as her lips tug into a grin on one side of her mouth.
Her fingers thread with mine, and I pull her to me, brushing my lips with hers as I dematerialize us from the house. Her arms go around my neck, and I hold her even tighter.
I break the kiss, and she looks around, seeing us high atop a mountain with the rest of the world far below our feet. Today, this is how the world looks from my eyes.
“I’m not the guy in this journal,” I tell her quietly, handing it to her.
She clears her throat as she takes it, then stares at me. “I know.”
“There’s nothing I can do to be him again, and that’s who you deserve to have love you,” I go on, frustrated as I roughly run a hand through my hair. “I became this man to save you. Not to be the man who loves you. I can’t do anything to change who the fuck I—”
My words end when she’s suddenly dragging me down and kissing me, grinning against my lips as I pull her closer. She’s the one to break the kiss after a few minutes of making me forget what the hell I was saying.
“I don’t want the man in the journal. I want the man who changed the world so he could write an epic love story,” she murmurs against my lips, and I groan as her grin grows.
“You can’t tell people that,” I point out.
“Oh, I’m telling everyone who will listen,” she argues, as she nips my lips, distracting me with that devilish mouth that I can finally enjoy without a deadline looming over my head.
It’s freeing and unnerving and exhilarating and…fuck. It’s everything right now.
She leans against me, turning in my arms to look down at the world below us.
My eyes move up to the sky, and I frown when I see a flicker of light. It almost looks like a sliver of the sky is torn. “What the hell is that?” I ask on an exasperated exhale.
“Something to worry about tomorrow,” she tells me, staring up at it. “It happened after my overachieving baby brother blew into the world with a blast of power strong enough to save my dad’s life.”
I glance down at her as she laughs under her breath.
“So this is it. Hannah’s really dead and we all sit around making jokes about the night?” I ask her, a little intimidated by how quickly they move on.
“No. Tonight we make jokes, because it’s too soon to process,” she tells me, rubbing her hand over my chest. “Maybe tomorrow or the next day, Leah will have to face the fact she met and killed her father in the same night, and he wasn’t even a true man anymore. Zee will be mad at her later for not warning him of our plan, after she’s processed her fatherly issues, because he can’t be mad at her right now for being a hero. My parents will focus solely on my baby brother, because they’ve survived the end of the world before. It’s nothing new to them.”
She peers up at me, and I brush her hair away from her face.
“Everyone will deal with it in their own way. It’s called living. It’s what happens after you finish surviving,” she adds.
My lips curve in a grin, and she stares as her own smile grows.
“What happens today?”
“Today we celebrate the surviving part, because it’s not as easy as we make it look,” she says, her lips brushing over my shoulder as she slowly starts tearing my shirt, ripping it from my left arm, up to my neck.
“Tomorrow?” I ask as her lips toy with mine while she works her way across my chest, continuing to rip the shirt from shoulder to shoulder until it falls to the ground.
“You spent centuries falling in love with a version of me that never existed, tomorrow we start on evening the score,” she says, eyes flicking up to mine.
“Only when I open the journal do I experience that,” I tell her, watching as she cocks her head. “Without the memories, all I know is you on a loop from eighteen to now.” Reaching back, I pull out the journal, flipping it open. “But you also don’t get to know all of me.”
She reaches down, running her hand over the journal, shutting it before my memories even start to form. “I didn’t ever really know this guy, but it’s hard not to fall in love with the guy who dedicated his life to writing our love story,” she states, her lips twitching. “It makes all those really gruesome deaths in my name weirdly romantic, especially since it’s cute how annoyed it makes you that I find it romantic.”
My right eye twitches, and she smirks as she runs her finger over the firm line of my lips.
“You’re trying to irritate me on a day where all I want to do is be inside you so that I know all this is real.”
She runs a hand over my chest. “I tore your shirt off. You’re the one still talkin—”