Eternal Eden (34 page)

As soon as he'd made his announcement, a chorus of objections was yelled, Joseph complaining the loudest. "Come on, William, you're not doing this to us again. You know the tradition—dinner, followed by a game . . . and it's my turn to pick!"

It was comical how serious Joseph was—he was truly upset his big brother was ditching out on the tradition of a game of Charades or Scrabble . . . whatever they played.

"Let him go," Cora soothed her husband. "They need some time alone." She probably figured her revelations to me today were the reason we needed this.

"Oh, pleeeeease . . . my big hero of a brother who I idolize, and look up to, and dote on." Patrick pulled his best vocal impersonation of Joseph. "Why would you want to leave with a beautiful woman to take a romantic moonlit walk when you've got board games and family waiting?"

Patrick continued his whining impersonation of the youngest Hayward brother, until William signaled to Joseph with a wink, and in a split second they charged Patrick and tackled him onto the loveseat behind them. Nathanial couldn't contain himself, and another second later he was on top of them all, sandwiching the beautiful, dark-haired brothers between he and Patrick.

Cora, Abigail and I watched with grins on our faces, enjoying the camaraderie of the four brothers and cheering for our own Hayward boy. It was hard to tell who won, or if any of them had, but William was the first up. He ran to me and grabbed my hand, while his three brothers continued their brawling on the assaulted loveseat and the overflow of the floor.

"Come on, let's go." He pulled the slider door open and we ran at a full sprint— leaving the cheer and warmth of his family and the cedar-planked cottage—for the sparkling, white sand and the ocean striped by moonbeams.

We didn’t stop running until we were a good mile down the beach. William obviously wanted to put some distance between us and his family, in case his rowdy brothers decided they weren’t going to let him go so easily. Slowing to a walk, we sat down to remove our shoes.

“Your family is amazing. They
adore
you,” I said. We stood up and walked down to the surf’s edge, carrying our shoes in one hand and holding hands with our other.

 “I don’t know about the adoration part, but they’re certainly wonderful. They’ve been there for me through many hard times.” His eyes squinted as if he was remembering something from his past. “They never gave up on me—loving me far more than I deserve.”

I squeezed his fingers. “I highly doubt that. It would be impossible to love you more than you deserve.” I stared up at the moon; it was high and bright tonight, and the way it highlighted the planes of William’s face made me feel I was hovering in a dream as opposed to real life.  His thumb massaged gently into the side of my hand, and I closed my eyes so I could experience nothing but his touch and the current that he emitted into me: steady, gentle and intimate.

“So,” he said hesitantly. “You were going to tell me what happened before you passed out tonight. Would you mind telling me now?” he asked so shyly, it would have melted any resolve I had against telling him.

“Of course, I’ll tell you.” I didn’t admit to him if he used that same tone with me again, he’d be able to derive anything from me he wanted. “Cora was telling me some stories—stories about you and your history.”

“What stories?” he asked slowly, stress lines forming on the outer corners of his eyes.

“The one about your visions of me.”

I was relieved to see his anxiety melt and a slow smile pull at the corners of his mouth. “Oh,
that
one.” His eyes looked deep into mine with mind-numbing wonder. “I was really hoping I’d be the one to tell you that one,” he said, looking a little regretful, but his smile did not falter. “That’s actually what I had planned for this evening’s agenda.”

“Tell me anyways.” I jumped in front of him, stopping him with my hand.

“Please . . . I want to hear it from you.” He hesitated, looking thoughtful. “Please,” I begged again. “It would mean a lot to me.”

He lifted his hand to my face, and I molded my cheek against it. “Of course, I’ll tell you. I will never keep anything from you, but it appears even if I wanted to, I’m completely unable to say no to you. You’re either incredibly convincing, or I’m a hopeless pushover.”

“Sorry, it’s in the blood. If you were born into the Dawson family you didn’t really have a choice in which career field you went into. You had Harvard Law or Stanford Law—that was about the only choice,” I joked as he pulled me down with him onto the shimmering sand.

I heard the grin in his voice as he curled his arms around me. “Thanks for the warning. It’s a good thing I’m on your side.”

He let a few moments pass in silence where I could feel him putting together the details of his story.

“I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the darkness that was in my life before you were there, Bryn. It was an unimaginable time for me, and it’s difficult for me to think about those early years, let alone talk about them.” He exhaled forcefully through his nose. “Besides, the critical piece to my story is you—none of the blackness or evil held sway once I saw you for the first time.”

He paused, and his head tilted back, as if he were examining the constellations he probably knew everything about. I kept my eyes on the white, frothy waves hurling themselves against the shore. “You were my light in the darkness. So many think of light as something that merely helps balance out the darkness, but if that light doesn’t overtake the majority of the black, then the darkness still holds the most power in one’s life . . . but that’s not the way it is at all. Once you’ve lived in nothing but darkness, when a light suddenly shines through—even the faintest glimmer—it’s all you see, all you focus on, and the only thing you live for.”

My eyes followed William’s upward gaze. A white streak burst through the sky the moment I looked up. I watched the shooting star until it burnt to its end, vanishing into the dark night sky.

“Seeing you freed me from the clutches of the darkness in my mind. They were still there, and always will be, but they don’t hold power over me any more.” He leaned his face into the side of my neck, whispering in my ear, “
You
do. I’ve lived every single day of my Immortality—for more than two centuries—seeing you, searching for you, and loving you.”

I struggled to restart my stalled heart.

“Does that sound crazy?” he asked, concern evident in his voice.

I pushed out of his arms and twisted around to look at him. “Don’t you ever say that . . . none of that sounds crazy. That’s pretty much the most romantic thing you could say to me.”

His eyes drowned in their relief.

“And while it tears me apart knowing the pain you’ve gone through, and continue to go through, knowing you loved me generations before I was even born fills me with the most indescribable happiness.” I was almost guilty of gushing by the time I’d finished, but I didn’t care.

My gushing complete, something important occurred to me. “How did you find me?”

He chuckled. “It wasn’t by mere coincidence I can assure you.”

An extra tenacious wave hurled against the shore, spreading its liquid plane up to the ends of my toes. “Will you tell me?”

He smiled, looking at me through his black fanned lashes. “I
found
a photo in the sports page of a California newspaper of a high school tennis champ . . . the woman I’d spent my life searching for.”

I remembered it. It had been taken the fall of my senior year after I’d won the conference match. “You just happened to fall upon this photo?” I asked with a teasing undercurrent in my voice.

“Not exactly,” he replied, sounding apprehensive. “In my spare time I sorted through newspapers, yearbooks, school photos—”

“In your spare time?” I said with awe, positive he was underemphasizing again. “How did you know I was in California?”

“I didn’t,” he said, his apprehension more pronounced.

“What . . .” I muttered, not understanding.

He responded quickly, “Let’s just say I had my work cut out for me. The internet was a godsend.”

“Wait,” I said, not believing the conclusion I’d just arrived at. “You’re saying you scoured through every newspaper in existence . . . and threw in a few yearbooks and school photos to boot?”

“Yes,” he said, looking sheepish. “In addition to several other sources . . .”

“Other sources?” I mumbled, more to myself than to him.

He opened his mouth, probably to go into more detail, but I raised my hand to it. I still couldn’t come to grips with him perusing random newspapers looking for a photo of me that would have never been printed had I not fired an ace over the net at game point that last game.

Serving had always come natural to me—like walking—and that serve might have had enough room for a hair to fit between it and the net. It was like destiny had been messing with that ball, willing it to hit the net so that photographer from the Santa Cruz Sentinel would never take my picture, and so William would never stumble upon it . . .

“That was two years ago,” I said, verbalizing my train of thought.

 “It didn’t take long for me to get a little backlogged with the population boom and corresponding number of papers in circulation,” he explained, sounding ashamed.

He’d misunderstood my time reference. I was stunned he was only two years behind. Actually, I was lucky. With anyone less determined than him, they would have come across that photo of me decades down the road and found me a wrinkled, silver-haired woman.

“How did you find me at OSU?”

A grimace of sheepishness flashed over his face. “I
borrowed
some files from your high school.”

I raised my eyebrows in an attempt to look scornful, but knew the most severe I looked was mildly disappointed.

“That’s where I learned you’d gone to Stanford, and that’s where I
borrowed
more files from to find you’d transferred to OSU that last quarter.”

His recollection had me understanding why he was so furtive and effective at Townsend Manor—espionage was another one of his specialties.

“And I just happened to be assigned as your last minute tour guide on a Friday night . . .  since I already know you were never enrolled,” I said, smirking at him.

This time, his eyebrows elevated in a way that led me to believe he was impressed by my own information I’d dug up . . . or at least gotten from Paul.

“No, I actually arrived the Friday before and”—he cleared his throat, eyeing me cautiously—“followed you around.”

“Followed?” I repeated, thrilled by the idea he’d been with me before I even knew.

“Maybe spied would be the truer word.”

I shook my head, astonished by his dedication. “I can’t believe you spent all that time looking for some random picture of me you might never have come across.”

His forehead wrinkled. “What would you have done then?”

I looked into the face that had somehow grown even more beautiful from today’s revelations, and thought about what I would have done had our roles been reversed, and it was me having visions of him and trying to find him. What would I do? It didn’t take long to find my answer.

Anything . . . absolutely anything.

“I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently,” I said, causing his smile to burst. I reached up to touch his mouth, but my lips immediately became jealous, and I removed my fingers right before my lips crashed into his.

They barely grazed his lips before I pulled back, but his hands reached up and encouraged me back to him. With inhuman constraint I resisted, and his encouraging hands did not press me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. His uneven breathing and moonlit eyes tore at my resistance. In terms of what he was asking, there was absolutely nothing the matter. My entire being wanted to be close to him—there was nothing wrong with him at all.

It was me. I couldn’t trust myself to stop when the time came; and the longer an intimate touch lasted, the more exponentially it crushed my resolve. By pulling away so soon just now, the scorching flame that ignited within me only had a second to make its appeal.

I looked down for a moment, embarrassed to admit my weakness. “Nothing’s the matter, I just . . .” I couldn’t find the right words to explain. I’d never had to breech anything close to this topic before. I witnessed the agony build in his eyes while I fumbled for the right words, and when none came, my frustration built, increasing the agony on his face. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't muster up the courage needed to bridge this delicate topic.

"What is it? Please tell me,” he pleaded. His eyes begged me, and he kept his hands on the sides of my face, not allowing my escape.

I darted my eyes down and left them there until I was certain they were free of emotion, knowing he could easily call my bluff if my words didn't match the emotions playing in my eyes.

 “I can’t talk to you about this right now.” His eyes continued to plead with me, begging me to let him in on the internal fight, so I shouted, “Please don’t make me talk to you about this!”

I leapt up, and ran hard and fast away from him, before he could witness the excruciating pain in my eyes that had peeled back the layer of nothingness. I knew he would follow me—that he wouldn’t allow me to be alone. In fact, I wanted him to come after me, because I didn’t want him to be alone either. What I did not expect was how fast he would catch up to me. I’d barely gone twenty strides before I felt his strong arms grasp around my waist.