She thought the blankness of the pages might be okay, though. Her purpose was not to re-create the moment precisely—only to remind Varen that it had transpired. Or rather, to remind them both of what had almost transpired.
“This is when it happened,” Isobel said. “Right in the middle of your reading to me.”
Varen didn’t move. But knowing that he was listening, she pressed on.
“I know you think I’m talking about when everything fell apart—when it all went wrong. But I’m not. . . .”
She scooted nearer to him, settling again when her shoulder met with his.
“I’m talking about the moment . . . when I fell in love. With you. Officially.”
She saw his hand resting on his knee—the one bearing his onyx, V-stamped class ring—twitch.
“When you were reading, I was listening to you, but at the same time . . . not. I heard your voice. Felt it. But the thing is, you had my hand, like this.”
Isobel gathered Varen’s hand in hers, pressing it between her palms as he’d done. The hard corners of his ring pressed cold and sharp into her palm.
“And I remember being so torn,” she continued. “Split between never wanting you to stop reading and wishing you’d shut up and kiss me.” Isobel allowed herself a small laugh. “I think it must have been on your mind too.”
He didn’t speak, but he turned his head toward her again.
Isobel tightened her grip on his hand, and her own went numb from the connection.
“Sometimes . . .” Isobel paused, then started again. “At least once every hour of every day . . . I find myself wondering how things might have been if . . . if your parents hadn’t come home early. If we had kissed then. Do you ever wonder the same thing? If any of this would have turned out differently?”
A beat passed in which he said nothing. Then, suddenly, Varen’s hand tightened around hers. “Read me something?” he said. The sound of his voice, the question itself, startled her.
Isobel’s eyes fell to the pages open in front of her as, slowly, the white space began to fill. She scanned the text as it formed, recognizing the poem by its title as one of Poe’s.
She remembered Varen mentioning this piece several times, though she’d never once read it. This had to mean two things: that Varen knew at least a portion of it by heart, and that he was the one making it appear.
Drawing a shaking breath, Isobel did the only thing she could do. She began to read out loud. To him.
“It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;—”
Varen clenched her hand tighter, but she didn’t look up and she didn’t stop reading.
“And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.”
Isobel stopped there. Because that was where the words dissipated.
She frowned, feeling the thump of her heart grow heavy while she waited. The right-hand page remained bare. Could it be that was all he recalled of the poem?
Then Varen spoke, picking up the lines from the memory that hadn’t failed him, after all.
“But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”
He stopped there. Pulling his hand free of hers, he rose.
As he did, the boards beneath them began to loosen, softening into . . . sand?
Isobel gasped when the support at her back vanished, and she would have fallen if not for the hand that caught hers just as a surge of warm water rushed in around them.
When Varen pulled her to her feet, sunlight—blinding—broke through the dissolving walls, illuminating the crystalline waters that now enveloped her legs.
Varen drew Isobel to him, and she saw that his clothes had changed. In place of his long coat, he wore an old-fashioned charcoal waistcoat and, beneath it, a white stiff-collared shirt, sleeve cuffs rolled to the elbows.
Isobel pressed her hands to his chest, stunned and entranced by how much the timeless style seemed . . . right. Almost as if she’d always known him this way.