I SHOULD HAVE KISSED YOU_Sometimes there are no tomorrows

http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/p/challenges.html

Once upon a time ...

There was a young girl undergoing painful treatments in the hospital. I owned a book store then. Harry Potter was just out.

Her mother would not let her read his novels. Not being heartless, she asked me to write something she would approve but would also appeal to her daughter's love of faeries and, frowning, she said "magic."

So Fallen, the last fae, and 14 year old Blake Adamson, the clone of the Nazarene, was born.

I made a serial of their adventures. They have never been read but by one ...

for some sleeping beauties never awaken.

(I later wrote other novels, using the same characters, but DAYSTAR'S ORPHAN remains unread by any but one ... until now.)

Here is an excerpt from the end of the trail for Fallen and Blake as he lies seriously wounded in the chariot winging its way to Valhalla, driven by the Angelus, Solomon Cain. Fallen is cradling him in her arms:


Black tears streaming down her face, Fallen held my hand tight as if willing her life force into me. “Don’t leave me, Blake. Don’t leave me.”

As black as her tears became the world around her, so that all I could make out was her face in an ever-thickening mist. My eyes must have been glazing over because I heard her crying low. She squeezed my hand even harder.

“If - If you st-stay, I-I’ll tell you a secret.”

I forced my eyes open wide to clear them.

She reached out and gently brushed that stubborn lock of hair from my eyes. “You know all those times you flew at night?”

I nodded.

“W-Well, I ... I crept into your room then.”

She turned her head to the left as if the memory was killing her. “I ... I used to go to your chest of drawers and touch your - your combs and brush, running my fingers along them. I’d imagine you fighting to get that mop y-you call hair to stay down.”

She smiled a smile of agony, her lips trembling. “I’d - I’d laugh and sit on your bed and s-smell your pillow, that always smelled of pine trees.”

Fallen looked as she were about to shatter inside.

“Th-Then, I’d pick up whatever book you were reading at the time, and ... and I’d open it, looking at the parts you - you underlined -”

She mewed soft and long as if she were about to break down. “Those - those parts you underlined. I read them out loud, pretending you were rea-reading them to me.”

She sniffed back the tears. “Your books. To my eyes, they burned with so many different colors. So many. I - I could tell what books made you sad, or laugh, or angry.”

Suddenly, she wrapped me in a fierce embrace. “But the book that burned the brightest was the one that had ‘Annabel Lee’ in it.”

She sniffed wetter this time. “I knew all about that poem, B-Blake, all this time. All this time.”

She clutched me tighter, holding her cheek against mine and rocking and rocking. “Y-You want to know what the color of love is?”

“Wh-What?”

“The color of love is you,” she sobbed. “Is you!”

She turned to Solomon, who was blinking back tears himself, and wailed, “You’re an angel. Tell me. Why does evil always win? Why? WHY?”

She raised her head and howled gut-deep like a shot animal. I couldn’t take it. And neither could Solomon. He turned his head away, choking down another sob. I lifted my hand with my mind fingers and stroked her cheek.

She shook her head that shivered in spasms. “I always thought I would be Annabel Lee. Not you. Not you!”

I forced my traitor throat to work, and it rebelled, making my words hoarse, almost impossible to understand even for me. “A-As long as you live, I live - in you.”

Her lower lip trembled so I thought she’d break down, but she managed to get out, “You big, d-dumb b-boy scout. I don’t want to go on living if you die. Don’t you know that?”

I tried to speak, but the world grew hazy and dark again. My head nodded to my chest. She shook me hard.

“Blake!”

I fluttered my eyes open and saw her reach frantic inside her mind as she tried to look devilish, but only managed to look even more miserable. “I - I know your secret.”

“What - what secret could ... a boy scout like me have?”

She smiled as if that secret was a knife in her heart. “That ‘full on the lips’ kiss you wrote about in your diary.”

“You read my diary!” I moaned.

She shook her mane, a bitterness twisting her face. “Such a silly thing. A simple thing. And ... And I teased you so with it.”

I had tried to stay with her, but it was no good. Her face. I could barely make it out anymore.

Only her tortured eyes, and them only in a thick haze. My head nodded, then my chin settled on my chest, and I heard her from far, far off.

“A-And now, wh-when it is too late, when y-you won’t even feel it, I’ll give you our f-first, our last, my only kiss.”

A flickering light filled my eyes. Fallen’s face came into focus. She was crying.

Her face was coming right to mine, her lips open, her breath soft and perfumed.

All became black.