Our faces were close enough for us to kiss, but we didn’t. I searched his features.

“I need something first,” I told him.

“Whatever you need.”

“Tell me… how long did you know Amy wasn’t well?”

He exhaled slowly, broke eye contact.

“Tell me?” I asked. “I’m trying to figure things out.”

“I’m… I figured there was time. She hates me. I needed to reach out, I needed to get to her, past that initial wall. Give it a few weeks, or months…”

“But you knew, and you kept it from me?”

He nodded.

“Hurts. Um, and I’m not blaming you, but… I and a bunch of other people got really hurt by that.”

“I’m just a teenage guy, Victoria,” he told me. “I’m stumbling through so much of this. I do the best I can, I make mistakes, or I get overconfident. I thought maybe I could help her get a handle on her issues before they could ever come up.”

And then you die before you can.

“Do you love me?”

“I do.”

I nodded.

I leaned back, using flight to keep myself upright-ish so I could pull it off. I ran my fingers through my hair after. I still wore a black tank.

He touched my arm, fingers tracing from shoulder to elbow. “Feels like a weird leap to make. Talking about heavy stuff like your sister, people getting hurt, me fucking up, moving to this.”

“What do you think ‘this’ is?” I asked. “I thought it wasn’t going to be anything rude.”

“It’s still a weird leap.”

“I’ve got so many walls up. If you want me to take the barriers away, I need to know I can trust you.”

He nodded.

“You didn’t tell me you’re Cauldron.”

His eyes widened.

“Pretty big betrayal, keeping that from me. So many conversations we had where you implied, you lied…”

“Yeah. I feel like a shitheel saying it, but is this another thing? Another barrier that gets lifted?”

“That is a shitheel sort of thing to say, Dean.”

“I’m just wondering… what happens next?”

“You’re really thinking about sex, now?”

“I’m really thinking about us, and the future. If I give the right answers, admit to my faults, do you leave and never come back?”

“I’m…” I stopped, shaking my head, my head rubbing against the sofa cushion. “…I’m really, really hoping and praying that this is a visit and I don’t come back for decades. Sorry.”

“Then what is this?”

“Resolution. Figuring out where we stand. Whether eighty percent of me loves you and twenty percent of me resents you, or if it’s fifty-fifty, which it probably isn’t, or ninety-five and five.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “It’s one of the rules. If we say anything, they come after us, and take away what they gave.”