Hers

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

I shut the front door and pressed my back against it.  My stomach was churning, my heart, fluttering.  I couldn’t stop smiling and I really didn’t want to.  The clouds had moved out just hours before the sun set and despite the fact that the only illumination from outside was the moon, light was everywhere.

Garfield sat on the couch, his tail swishing lazily as he glared at me.  I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously.

“What?”  I asked him.  He meowed at me.

I could practically hear his thoughts, quit grinning like a fool and take me to bed, dammit.

“You are not sleeping in my bed tonight.”  I wagged my finger at him.

Meow.

“I mean it, Garfield,” I scolded him.  “You can sleep here on the couch.”

He leaped from the couch and bolted towards my bedroom.  I followed behind him, muttering the whole way about stubborn cats.

I entered the room to see him lying at the end of the bed with his head on his paws.  As much as I hated to say it, he was pretty adorable.  I huffed and crawled into bed, leaving the light on out of fear of the shadows.

With the lights burning through my eyelids and my covers pulled up to my chin, I began to drift off.

Just as I was starting to slip into unconsciousness, I heard a noise, like a distant rumble.  Mumblings of a language I didn’t know.  But it was too late, I was already too far gone.

I could see an image of myself that I had become all too familiar with.  Long, curly strawberry blonde hair brushed against my bare back.  My grey blue eyes slid over the scenery surrounding me.  Samael stood just a few feet away, looking just as stunningly handsome as ever.

The grass was a lush green and came just above my hips.  Water flowed from a stream not too far away while birds swooped and sang and the smell of flowers and honey filled my lungs.  The sky was a blue that could never be matched.  Clouds stacked higher and higher until they looked more like a painting than water vapor.  The world was at peace.

There was just one thing wrong.

In the distance, Samael’s eyes floated up to the sky with a look of wanting, with one of heartbreak and sadness.  A sadness that I had caused.

I felt as though I was hanging onto a rope that was dangling from someplace high up in the sky with the ground hundreds- thousands of feet below me.  I didn’t want to let go.  I didn’t want to lose Samael.  But I had to.

“Samael,” I called.  My voice always surprised me.  It was dainty, fragile, everything that I wasn’t.

His green eyes flickered over to me and I felt my stomach drop.  Those eyes.  Eyes that I had always loved, even from the moment that I saw them.  A green deeper than the greenest maple leaves.  As he approached, I dug my toes into the cold, moist earth as if to keep myself grounded like the roots of a tree.

“I was tempted by a fallen,” I informed him, my eyes glued to his.

“I am the only angel to have been cast out,” he contradicted.

“There is another.”

“Lucifer?”  He asked, his voice revealing his disbelief.

“Satan,” I answered, lowering my eyes to the ground.  “I carry his spawn.”

Samael stepped back as though I had slapped him.  Those eyes I loved so much now showed anger and hurt towards me.  For the first time, he was looking at me like I was a monster, like I was the demon I was meant to be.