I’m sitting quietly in my bed. The soft tapping of a light, early-morning rainshower in my ears. Aiden’s face resting against my chest.

I woke up with him in my arms. Blinked my eyes open to find him sleeping soundly, laying half over me, the toasty heat of his body melting into mine. The weight of him pinning me in place, his glossy chestnut hair soft against my skin.

I managed to sit up without waking him. Now I have my back against the headboard, but Aiden still cradled in my arms. He curled up even closer to me when he felt me move, and now I can bow my head over his, put my nose in his hair, take long breaths of him.

I close my eyes, wishing I could slow down time, slow down every raindrop to fall against my window, make this moment eternal. I want to live in it forever.

There’s a sensory, sensual kind of bliss that comes from being cozied up with Aiden like this. His warmth, weight, solidity. I can feel his love in the way he holds me, even when he’s asleep. Somehow it flows between us, like the tide of a peaceful ocean. I float effortlessly in it, caught up in it, but also grounded and centered by Aiden's heavy, muscle-roped body.

I orbit happily around him, basking in his heat, his light.

The warmth that comes from this, I feel right at my very center, my core. It flows out from there, spreads through me, and envelops me completely. I’m swimming in it deeply, right now.

But I’ve also gone deeply into my thoughts. I haven't really had an opportunity to do that, since what happened at the clifftop.

My mind has gone directly back to the conversation that Aiden and I had the morning after. What he said to me, during that.

You know that day at the beach, when we were kids? When we sat together, and - I made you laugh? Yeah. I never recovered from that.

I understood in that moment that Aiden was telling me something important, in his shy, obscure way. Now I’m thinking hard about what he actually meant.

I never recovered from that.

Aiden makes it sound like he took something everlasting from that day.

I’ve drifted back through my memory and stopped there, at the beach with Aiden. I’m realizing that I have a much clearer memory of that day than I'd previously thought.

It had ended so, so horribly. Aiden told me to fuck off, said something about how he hated my voice, how annoying it was… He made me feel so stupid, so angry, so sad.

I had stuffed that memory as far down as possible, because it hurt. I never wanted to think about it again, so I did my best to leave it alone, to forget it. I left it to hopefully decay into nothing in some dark corner of my mind I never planned to return to.

But now that I have returned there, and reached for the memory again - I’m finding that it hasn’t decayed at all. I’m slowly and meticulously brushing off the dust, and suddenly the colors are vivid again, the sensations all still there, unfaded.

Strange. I honestly believed that I had forgotten all but the vague outlines. Now I’m coming to understand that the memory was so sharply painful for me that I just hadn’t dared to let myself touch anything more than the periphery.

But it’s all still there.

It does occur to me that I might be inventing things, letting my imagination fill in the gaps, but - I have some inexplicable, immense certainty in my heart that this isn’t the case. There are no gaps. I’m not painting in new colors, lights, shadows. Only uncovering what was already there.

The memory is intact, like it was waiting patiently all this time for me to come back to it. I can see the colors of the sea and sky. I can almost taste the salt in the air.

I look down at the man in my arms. His stubbled, rugged jaw. The sleek, graceful muscles of his big body. The strong, filled-out bone structure of his face. Those delicate lines at the corners of his eyes.

I remember him as a fifteen-year-old. As he was, all that time ago.

I remember gazing out over the beach, and seeing him.

I wonder if the way I felt in that moment is why I can recall this memory in such vivid detail. I remember standing there in stunned silence, motionless, wide-eyed. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were telling me.

Aiden always had a kind of iron, unshakeable hardness and coldness about him. He was ruthless, unmoved, always glacially calm. He would say and do things that would put me on the verge of tears, and he’d be expressionless. He wouldn’t even blink. Half the time he wouldn't even look at me.

You would think that nothing affected Aiden, ever. You would think that he honestly didn’t care about anything. I never saw any emotion from him. He hid it all so exceptionally well, so deep down inside of himself that I had started to think he didn’t even have any.

So it was the strangest, most startling thing imaginable to see him sitting there alone on the beach like that. His head on his knees, his shoulders slumping, his hands holding tight fistfuls of his hair. He looked so broken and alone, so crushed with sadness. The one time I caught him without anyone else around, the one time he mistakenly thought no one was looking, I found him like that.

I almost refused to believe it. I had easily recognized him from where I was, and still, I wondered if I was actually looking at someone else.

But there was proof that it was him.

Aiden hadn’t shown up for the soccer game that was being played at school. I didn’t stay to watch it, but Kasey did, and she texted me about it. In a school as small as ours, it was big news. Aiden and his friends cut class all the time, but no one could remember a time when he blew off a soccer game. The team wasn’t playing well without him. Kasey said that the coach and his teammates were pretty obviously pissed off about it.

When I saw Aiden alone on the beach, he was wearing his jersey, but also his jeans. Like he had started to get changed for the game, then stopped halfway through, for some reason.

So it was undeniably him. I could see the black letters stamped across the back of his jersey: CALLAHAN.

It was definitely Aiden, and he looked like he was about to cry.

I stood there watching him for a long time, then caved and set off for him. I should have known better by that point, but I couldn’t just leave him there and walk away. That went against my every instinct, everything my heart was telling me to do. Aiden looked so lost, and he really must have been, because it took him almost twenty minutes to notice me sitting beside him.

I just waited, hoping he’d have some way of sensing that somebody was there with him.

And he did, which - in retrospect…

“Oh,” I say softly, twisting my fingers into his chestnut hair. “You - you heard me, didn’t you?”

Aiden goes on slumbering contentedly in my arms, doesn’t answer. But I think I already know the answer, anyways.

I gaze down at him, remembering the way he looked at me, that day. It was so different. Everything about him was so different. He was like a totally different person, not at all the Aiden that I knew.

This Aiden was still quiet, but his voice and eyes were rich with emotion. He talked to me, and listened to what I said. He smiled at me. He made me laugh, and he laughed, himself. That soft, bright huff of laughter. It was the first time I ever heard it.

The way he looked at me, his blue eyes warm to their deepest depths.

Who are you? I remember thinking, staring at him after he laughed. Are you really Aiden Callahan?

Then Aiden suddenly turned back into his old self, so fast he gave me whiplash.

I was so thrown off when he did that. When I realized that this other version of him had all been bullshit, all part of some nasty set up to make me lower my guard around him so his words would cut deeper.

Because I had believed him, and believed him completely. It all seemed so sincere, so genuine, that I hadn’t seen it coming at all. I had been happy, I thought we were having a real conversation, I thought -

I don’t know. But after I stormed off of the beach, after I got past how angry Aiden had made me - I was just sad. Crestfallen.

After the poem incident, I promised myself that I would never trust Aiden, that I would never let myself get played and manipulated like that again. And that was exactly what I’d let happen. The Aiden I talked to at the beach was an act, and once again, I was dumb enough to buy it.

After all, I never saw that version of Aiden again. For all the rest of high school, he was the cold, apathetic, heartless person I’d known before.

Only... now I know that Aiden was never actually the person he pretended to be in high school. Not deep down. That was so far from who he really is that now it hurts him to even think about it. The real Aiden is the one in my arms right now, the one I fell in love with. And he was always in there, the whole time.

Which means - the Aiden I met at the beach…

I think of him sitting there on the pebbles, in his soccer jersey, his face turned towards me. His blue eyes looking at me with such warmth, his windblown chestnut hair gathering up the fading sunlight.

I stare down at Aiden, then gently move him off of me. I slide down in the bed and lay on my side, facing him.

“Was that the first time we really met, Sugar Maple?” I murmur, trailing my knuckles down the side of his sleeping face. “As ourselves?”

Aiden lets out a soft sigh in his sleep, and one chestnut strand tumbles down over his eyebrow. I smooth it back slowly, unable to take my eyes off of him.

That sunset we spent together... it was the one and only time that Aiden and I let our souls speak to each other. I saw his, and at the same time, he listened to mine. To - us, I guess.

It was once. It was only for a few short minutes. It never happened again, not for all the rest of high school, and then we didn’t see each other for eight years.

Yet Aiden held onto that moment, all this time. He told me himself that it played a role in bringing him back to me.

I think I've just understood what role that was.

I bite my lip, staring at Aiden with enormous eyes.

He’s on his side, like me. I move very slowly to fit my bare body against his. The heat of his skin against my skin. He stirs in his sleep to wrap an arm around me, holding me to him.

I kiss him awake very gradually. Starting light, soft, slow. My lips just barely touching his, my fingertips trailing gently over his dark stubble. Then I start dragging my knuckles up and down the hard line of his jaw, kissing him just as slowly, but with more warmth, fullness, depth. Aiden lets out a little breath, and his lips part beneath mine, opening up to me even in his sleep.

He’s slowly waking up, and now we’re both kissing each other. I feel one of his huge, gentle hands spread on my back. It slides up into my hair, grasps a fistful of it for a second. Then his fingers go sliding back down, stopping at the base of my spine and staying there.

Aiden smiles against my lips, then kisses me deeply, fusing our bodies and mouths together. The air around us is simmering with his heat.

When I draw back, I only let our mouths come apart. Everywhere else, I stay as close to Aiden as I can possibly get.

“Hi,” he laughs, his voice rough and husky. “Wow, you sound - you…”

He closes his eyes for a moment, listening. Then he opens them, looks into mine with obvious curiosity. I wrap my hand around the back of his neck, stroke him with my thumb.

“I want to show you something,” I tell him softly.

Aiden pauses, growing serious at the tone of my voice. “Okay?”

I take a deep breath, then let all my barriers down.

Aiden gasps, gripping my hip tightly as my love pours through our connection, flooding him. He closes his eyes and shudders, suddenly breathing hard, breathing with his whole body. His mouth is slightly open, his eyebrows drawn up and together. Goosebumps race down his arms, and before I can blink, he’s throwing off Heliomancer light, his bare, bronze body glowing.

He opens his eyes and looks at me, panting. The golden halo of light he’s emanating collects in those two blue pools, shining out at me. His cheeks are burning crimson, his hand holding me tight enough to leave bruises.

He manages to gasp out my name, then immediately gives up on talking out loud.

Jamie, what...? he stammers, breathless even with his inside voice. Holy - sh-shit, oh my god -

I’m sorry, I murmur, brushing a lingering kiss onto his mouth. I know it’s a lot. It’s just how I’m feeling about you, right now. I thought you should know.

I draw back, then draw some of my energy back into myself, too. I give Aiden a minute to catch his breath, and he does, taking long, full, deep inhales.

He doesn’t stop glowing, though. His shimmering light spills over me, bathes us both.

When Aiden blinks his eyes open again, they’re hazy and warm, swimming with ecstasy. He lets out a soft, dazed laugh, still breathing hard, his mouth turned up in a blissed-out smile.

That, he says, That felt, um… what did I do to make you feel this way about me? For future reference.

I nuzzle my nose into his. I figured it out, Sugar Maple. What you meant by what you said. About that day we talked on the beach, back in high school.

Aiden freezes, then swiftly pulls all of his emotions away from the connection. He keeps it open just enough for us to talk.

Did you? he asks, and I don’t need the connection to understand how shy and nervous he suddenly is. Because, I - I want you to know. It’s just hard for me to - it’s just hard for me.

I know, and I understand. I draw away again, so I can meet his gaze. I think I’ve got it, though.

Aiden is holding perfectly still, but I can feel his racing heartbeat through the connection. Okay.

You told me that you’ve been in love with me since you were fifteen.

Aiden nods, very slowly. Yes.

You were fifteen. That day when we sat and talked.

Yeah, man. Aiden tucks a strand of hair out of my eyes. I know.

Were you in love with me? I ask, my pulse racing just as fast as his. Were you in love with me, on that day?

There’s a long, long silence. Only the tapping of the raindrops on the window. I lay there in the pool of Aiden’s heat and light, waiting. Holding my breath. Looking into his eyes.

Aiden looks back into mine, then huffs out a very quiet, helpless little laugh.

That day, he says quietly, touching his fingertips to my jaw. And every day after that.

He breaks the connection, closes his arms around me. Draws me up against him, then presses a slow, intimate kiss onto my mouth.

“Every night, too,” he rumbles softly, right into my ear.

I lock my arms around him, my heart hammering as he pulls back to look at me. “So - that day, our talk, that was when you-?”

“Yes,” Aiden says, all in a rush.

My breath stops.

He told me. He finally told me.

I fall onto my back and stare at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. My memory of the sunset I spent with Aiden is playing out in my mind again, steeped in vivid new significance. I find a smile slowly spreading across my face.

Aiden watches me for a moment, then curls up against me, puts his head back on my chest. Smiling, glowing as his thoughts follow mine back to that day.

We lay there in serene silence, finally able to remember together.