She does not answer him and some vicious thing swells to take up all the space in his gut and in his chest so that the bastard heart struggles to beat around it.
What has she done?
He has no right to jealousy, of course, he never has. But that does not stop it from staking its claim and rearing its ugly head and dousing him in something cold and dark. There must be a reason she hasn’t answered and in this, he thinks, he has his answer.
He had been gone for a long time, such an impossibly long time. He could not have expected her to wait for him. Had he told her that he would be back? Had he told anyone that he was going? Or had he simply vanished with the wind, as he was wont to do? It was so long ago that he does not remember now.
She murmurs the name, the same way she’d done so many years before, and he smiles again. It is a wayward thing and his gaze softens and he exhales long and slow because it hurts. Oh, how terribly it hurts. And knowing that the pain is of his own doing makes its sting all the more powerful.
He registers her surprise, lets it sink in, lets it tear him apart. How he wishes it would reach into his chest and carve out his still-beating heart. He presses his mouth into a tight line then and finds that he has to look away. This is his doing, his own selfish fault, and he knows now that he should not have said anything at all.
“She was beautiful,” he tells the horizon, swallows thickly, “like you.” He gives pause then, though he does not drag his gaze away from the faultline where the earth met the sky. “Just like you,” he murmurs, his throat tight with something. Sadness, perhaps. A certain nostalgia for what once had been and would never be again.
It is her question that finally forces him to shift his focus back to her face, though it pains him to look at her now. “It’s been so long,” he says, “it was another life.” He tilts his head and smiles ruefully, “and I don’t know how many of our memories we’re allowed to take with us when we go.”
