Seduction (2016) (Romance)

Chapter 21: What We Did

Michael opened his eyes, immediately sitting up in shock. 

"What?!"

This was not his bed, this was not his home. This was something....completely different. Once the fear and shocked were settled, the next feeling he felt within him was....warmth. 

The warm feeling was not as simple as saying he was hot or mentally comfortable no, in fact, the exact opposite. While Michael was obviously more concerned with where Brianna was and if she was even here, he was also pushing the comfortable feeling of this warmth within away as more pressing matters were at hand.

"Brianna?! BRIANNNNNAAA???!!" 

Michael called out, trying to move himself around the tall fields and grass the lay at this feet, the soft echoes of his yells bouncing back to the fearful husband. 

Michael continued to run and roam around the area until he spotted his house once more across from the hill he found himself upon. 

"Please, please let her be in there." 

Michael ran across the clearing and burst into the house, but what he saw next, he was never prepared for. 

Instead of the normal couch, television, books and the like, it was completely empty. There were no lines of items being moved or a scene of a robbery, but everything had been empty, hollow and white as if not a single human occupant had ever stepped foot inside the house. "What the hell is going-"

But before he could finish the comment, he heard the soft sound of music amongst one of the closed doors in the hallway. As he moved closer to the source of the noise, he realized it was in his and Brianna's bedroom. 

"Brianna?", Michael asked softly against the door before it slowly opened on its own.

"Hey babe..", Brianna responded as Michael looked across the room to see her, a music speaker playing the music and the woman he loved in a beautiful white dress and standing in front of the edge of a cliff overlooking the calming ocean. 

"Brianna, thank god!", Michael said as he ran over to her side. "Baby are you okay? Where-"

Brianna encaptured the questioning Michael in a soft kiss and continued by calmly telling him, "Be still my love and come look at what we did." 

"Babe, we can't do this right now. We have to call someone and figure out why our house has been moved to this other spot or where our stuff is and how we-"

"Please, for me, come look."

Michael sighed and eventually relented to her plea as he loved her too much to deny her anything at all. When Michael and Brianna reached the cliff edge, the man had gasped at what he saw in place of the ocean: a sea of golden images, voices, laughter, tears, visions from the past and present had been sewn together to replace the once blue sea. 

"Baby, I want you to know something and I wanted you to be still for what I am about to tell you."

Brianna turned and held her husband's hands in hers as he looked into her beautiful brown eyes that led to her amazing soul.

"Last night, I passed away in my sleep, peacefully, but I passed while you still remained in the Earth for a few more hours before I was told you had passed as well. I use to not believe in heaven or anything like that and no baby, I'm sorry, but this isn't heaven or the afterlife or reincarnation or anything like that. This is what we did and what we made together. THIS is what they mean when the say"Till death do we part" 

Michael began weeping at this sudden revelation, but Brianna was determined to hold him together as she always did whenever he was saddned or stressed. 

"B-but..w-we just..."

"I know babe, I know. I looked into our lives and what will happen and I promise you, everything will be perfect. Emily will grow up and live a happy life with her own children, EJ and Maria will remember us and will have something like this on their own and I promise you, nothing bad will happen here. I promise." 

Michael would never have believed it. Any of those words would have just passed from one ear to the other if it had been from some skeleton or cloaked figure proclaiming themselves as Death or "A Messenger from Above"

Seeing his wife in that white dress, with the face, eyes, and joys of a young woman in place of the wise, kind and gentle 95-ear-old body she had left back on Earth and feeling the youngness in his bones instead of Arthritis in his 94-ear-old body...

He knew this wasn't heaven, but SHE was his heaven. 

"Okay. So...what do you wanna do now?"

"How about we go for a swim?" Brianna responded eagerly, pulling Michael close to the edge where they would have NEVER gone to in the real world due to the obvious dangers of falling off a cliff into the ocean. 

With his wife's warmth now realized and flowing through him, he would follow and believe in her trust and she trusted him throughout her marriage, their young love, their parenthood and their grandparenthood. 

And with one last glimmer of a smile between the Lozano couple, they fell into the golden sea. 

The waves of love had enveloped them once more.