Like even after all this time, it couldn’t be real.
I’d been here before. Dreaming of him.
Waxing and waning. Waxing and waning.
He stood with his back to me. He had peeled off his coat and shirt, and they lay discarded on the floor in a wet heap.
The muscles in his back rippled. His head was bowed, and I didn’t know why.
“Mark?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
He breathed, but he didn’t speak.
I took another step toward him, reaching out in the bond that stretched between us. I thought I was too late. That coming here had been a mistake. That I’d be met with nothing but a wall of violet rage and that he’d turn, teeth bared, skin shifting, and no matter what I said, no matter how hard I tried, he wouldn’t know me. He wouldn’t remember me.
But instead of violet, I was drowning in blue. So much blue.
I stopped.
I said, “Mark?”
His shoulders shook. “You.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t raise his head. I didn’t know what he was looking at. “I told myself that you—that you’d forgotten.”
“About what?”
He laughed, though it cracked right down the middle. “This. Me. Everything.”
“I don’t—”
He raised his hand so I could see it over his shoulder.
Clutched in his fingers was a raven made of wood.
The raven I’d left on the nightstand after taking it out of the secret pocket where it’d stayed hidden for over three years.
The raven he’d given to me when we didn’t know any better.
He said, “It took me weeks to do this. To make this. To get it just right. I nicked my fingers more times than I could count. The cuts always healed, but sometimes the blood got into the wood, and I would rub at it until it was ingrained. I didn’t—I didn’t like the way one of the wings looked, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So I went to Thomas. He smiled at me when he took it in his hands. He studied it for a long time. Then he handed it back to me and said it was perfect the way it was. And I remember being so angry with him. Because it wasn’t perfect. It was crude. Clumsy. Do you know what he said to me?”
I shook my head, unable to speak.
“He said, ‘It’s perfect because it’s imperfect. Like you. Like Gordo. Like all of us. It’s perfect because of the intent. Of what it means. He’ll get it, Mark. I promise you he’ll understand.’”
I blinked away the burn.
Mark shook his head. “And I remember being so irritated with him. It sounded like something our father would say. A bunch of Alpha nonsense. Because it was imperfect. It was flawed and misshapen. It took me a while to see that was the point. And you kept it.”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I took it with me. When we left.”
He turned slowly. The shadows played along his bare skin. The hair on his chest trailed down to his stomach and disappeared into the top of his pants. He held the raven in his hand gently, as if it were something to be revered.
“Why?”
I looked away and remembered his words when we’d last been alone. “Because it was the only part of you that’s ever been mine.”