Fate Forgotten (16 page)

Adam sat in the car outside the shop for hours. He could feel her now, though he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t before. He could feel her inside, and the agony of her heart, and he wanted nothing more than to go to her, but even being here was too close.

Without conscious decision, he got out of the car and walked to the shop. The bell chimed as he entered. Eve looked up, her lips parted, her expression eager, and when she recognized him, he saw and felt her relief, followed swiftly by guilt.

He stopped a few feet from the counter, wishing he could stop her from feeling that way. She shouldn’t have to feel guilty for loving him. She shouldn’t have to feel guilty for being happy to see him. But he stood there, at a loss for words now that he was before her.

She stepped around the counter, but seemed to hesitate to close the gap, until she made a strangled noise and reached for him. He took her in his arms, her face hidden against his chest and held her tightly, memorizing the feel of her body against his, murmuring soft reassurances as she tried desperately to keep from sobbing. It was as if a dam had broken, and everything she had controlled so carefully the day before was spilling out. Everything he had hoped she felt, dreamed she might be willing to offer. He hadn’t been sure until that moment, not completely, but her feelings burned bright now, branded him, and if it was not love yet, he knew then it could be. If she let it. If he stayed.

All the more reason to go.

“Shh,” he said softly, kissing the top of her head. “I’m here.”

She shook her head. “I wanted you to come.”

He smiled, and closed his eyes. The better to feel her warmth. “I wasn’t sure I should.”

“I was so afraid you would.” She pulled back to look up at his face. “I can’t be strong again, Adam. I can’t tell you to go. Not a second time.”

“You won’t have to.” He stroked her hair back from her face, and looked into her eyes. “I’m packed. Everything is in the car outside, waiting for me. I’m only here to say goodbye.”

“But you don’t want to go.”

He couldn’t stop himself from kissing her forehead. Then her eyelids, and the tip of her nose, and he pressed his forehead against hers, and held her face in his hands, his eyes closed against his own grief. So much pain. He hadn’t realized how much it would hurt, but he should have known. He should have known.

“It isn’t about what I want. Not this time.”

Then she was kissing him, her lips soft against his, then desperate, and he had to pull away before his meager resolve left him. She covered her mouth with her hands, as if she had realized her mistake. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Eve. Not for this.” He brushed the tears from her cheek and pulled her back into his arms, tucking her head beneath his chin, breathing in the scent of her, all sunshine and summer, and willing himself to remember this always. “Never for this. Promise me.”

I never meant for this
, she said.

“I know.” He held her all the more tightly. “I should go.”

She shook her head and didn’t release him. “There has to be a way. There has to be some way that we can do this, Adam.”

“No, Evey. This is the best way. The only way.”
So that I can love you. Because without the world, we can’t even have that.

She let him disentangle himself from her body and peel her fingers from his shirt with gentle pressure. He stepped back when she had finally let him go, and smiled his most charming smile, putting as much confidence in his tone as he could.

“I’ll be right here,” and he touched the place over her heart. “I promise.”

And then he turned and left. One foot in front of the other, one step following the last, until he was back in the car again outside. With two doors between them, he finally let himself look back.

She stood in the window of the shop. One hand raised against the glass as she watched him.
I love you because you walked away,
she said, soft and miserable.

I know.

The car pulled away into traffic, just as thunder began to roll overhead. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Better late than never, he supposed, though it would have been nice if the god had arrived a bit sooner. Before he had fallen in love so utterly with Eve.

He directed the driver to pull over in the park district and got out. The thunder had followed him, as he knew it would, and he walked to a bench in the shade of immense oak trees and overlooking a well kept pond. Thor arrived without his usual display of lightning, and sat down beside him without a word.

“What kept you?” Adam asked.

Thor’s eyes glowed white, but he stared at the water. “I was here from the moment you set foot in the city.”

Useless of him. They were all useless anymore, these gods without people. Vagabonds, now, without their countries. “You should have stopped me.”

“I owed her the choice. Free will was not only valued by your God, Adam.”

“Yet you have stood in the way of mine for more than a century.” He felt disgusted and angry. Thor could have stopped him. Could have prevented all of this. But this time, this once, he let some moral high ground stand in his way. This time, when it was the most important.

Thor growled. “You were given the choice as well. You took power and money in exchange for Eve. That you regret that choice is not my concern or my responsibility.”

He sneered. As if any wealth were an even exchange. He had been cheated. Cheated twice because he couldn’t have her anyway, as Thor had known. He hated this god. Hated how well he knew her. “For someone who claims to love her, it seems all you do is let her suffer. She wouldn’t have to, now, if you had acted as you were bound to do.”

“You dare blame me for your own selfishness?” The god’s eyes flashed, the glow intensifying, and thunder cracked overhead louder than before. “You knew it was impossible before you set out on this crusade. You knew that she would never have you. Never risk the world! And yet you still hunted for her, still sought her. For what? For a stolen kiss and a river of tears? So that she would share the misery you’ve lived with? No, Adam. This blame lies on your shoulders alone. This cruelty is your particular brand, borne of twisted emotion masquerading as love.”

Thor stood then, and Adam felt his fury barely contained. And something else. Something deeper which kept him from action but which Adam couldn’t name. Lightning flashed, and the god was gone without another word.

Adam shook his head and stood up, though Thor’s last words still seemed to hang in the air around him. Like weights around his neck. Eve had asked him if he was capable of love, and now he wondered if his answer had been more hope than truth. Did Thor go to Eve now, to comfort her in some mortal guise? If he did, was that not also selfishness? Did they suffer the same flaw? A fault which kept them from the woman they loved eternally?

He went back to his car and drove on to the airport. If he didn’t leave the country, he would only return to her, and each time it would be more difficult to go. Each time would be another knife in her heart that he didn’t want to be responsible for.

He spent the rest of the day in a fog, waiting for thunder and lightning to signal some new punishment for the state he had left Eve in. It wouldn’t have been the first time such a punishment had been exacted. But what was he supposed to do now? How was he to fill the eighty years that stared at him gaping and empty with the knowledge that he could not spend them with Eve?

Eve.

On the jet, he closed his eyes and searched for her presence, clear and bright to him now in the masses of the city. How had he missed it before? She was still in the shop, and he could feel her struggling not to weep. He could feel her losing that struggle, too, and sliding down the wall, her knees to her chest, her face hidden in her arms, and crying.

I’m sorry,
he whispered to her.

God was cruel to make us this way,
she said.

He sighed. He could not remember much of God, and he wished that he could now, to comfort her with some proof. But those had been memories he’d sought to find in her. Memories he couldn’t ask her for now. Not when she suffered so.
I love you.

Just go, Adam. Just go.

He did as she asked, only then feeling the speed of the jet and the pressure as it rose into the air. Was there nothing he could do to give her comfort?

He knew better than to believe it was chance that brought the girl to the bar he chose to drown his sorrows. A girl with green eyes, though they lacked Eve’s depth, and dark hair. He stared at her over the rim of his glass, and she smiled prettily, blushing when she noticed. He wondered which god found him so pitiable to send this woman, and how faithless was he that he wanted to take her to bed with him. Would they send a similar man to Eve? Someone who resembled him just enough that she could pretend, if she chose to, that it was him she was loving?

He downed the last of his drink and tried to ignore the image that had sprung into his mind of Eve making love to someone else. He’d had enough of that when she was married to Garrit. Watching her touch him, watching her look at him with adoration. It had been torture. Nor had it made it any easier to know that it could have been worse. One glimpse was all he had ever needed of her life with Thor.

A glass of whiskey slid down the smooth wood into his hand, and he dropped several large bills onto the bar, tapping the counter with an implicit “keep them coming” gesture. Cash did still have its uses, after all. But he hadn’t had nearly enough to drink on the plane, and he was determined to get himself so plastered that he wouldn’t care that the woman he took to bed with him wasn’t Eve.

The money disappeared from the counter and a bottle replaced it with a dull thunk. The bartender had bright red hair, and narrow green eyes. Adam glared at him when he smirked. “You’ll like that one,” the man said. “Hardest I’ve got, and well worth the money spent.”

Irish, by the sound of him, or else pretending to be to capitalize on his tips. If he was pretending, he did a damn good job of it. Adam lifted the glass, swirling it once, then drank it down. The burn was pleasant, smooth and clean. “Better than the swill they served me on the plane.”

The barman grinned and jerked his head to the right. “The woman there said you were a man of distinguished taste and loaded with funds enough to afford it.”

Adam glanced over his shoulder. Of course it would be her. The woman met his eyes and smiled, and the resemblance to Eve vanished in the curve of her mouth and a flash of gold in her eyes. Now he was sure it was some trick of the gods, and all the more reason not to get involved with any of it.

He poured another glass and slugged it back. The gods could keep their look-a-likes. He wasn’t going to accept substitutes, or if he did, he wanted them to remind him as little of what he’d lost as possible, and even with the smirk and the sundrop eyes, it was too close. “Tell her thanks, but I’m not interested in any consolation prizes. She’s better off going home with you.”

The barman laughed. “I tell her that often enough. Sometimes she even listens, but you—” He shrugged. “You’re exactly what she’s been waiting for.”

Adam shook his head. “She’ll get sick of waiting and crawl back in bed with you, I’m sure.”

“She surely will.” He grinned and refilled the glass. “But not ‘til she’s finished in yours.”

A hand covered his, manicured nails and soft skin. Even her fingers were shaped like Eve’s. He swallowed the whiskey and kept his eyes on the bottle. “You don’t even realize you’re a pawn, do you? We’re all just amusement for some higher power, hoping to see how twisted he can make us before we break.”

“We’re not all so cruel, Adam,” she said.

He looked up at his name, his stomach lurching at the sound of it.

Her dark hair rippled into gold and sunlight, her eyes changing from green to the amber of honey. He looked back at the bottle that had been placed before him, still mostly full, and counted the other empty glasses. Only three. Not enough for him to have imagined this, then.

“Some of us just want to offer what comfort we can give. And perhaps something more. Satisfaction for the pain you’ve suffered by godly hands.”

He blinked at the golden glow that seemed to blur his vision. She was certainly beautiful, and now that she no longer held Eve’s form, nothing at all like her. “I was under the impression that your people didn’t care for me that much.”

“Perhaps I dislike my brethren even more.”

“Do I know your name, goddess?”

She smiled and leaned closer, her hand stroking his arm and her breath tickling against his ear. She smelled like honey, too. Or maybe like mead. Whatever it was, he wanted it, though part of him knew it was because she meant him to.

“You can call me Sif,” she said.

Chapter Sixteen: 318 AD