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Skye was somewhere she didn’t know. It was like a room filled white light. White light, and her. There were no walls, floor or roof. Then looking down she saw that she stood on golden sand, and when she looked up again, blue sky arched above her. It was a beach, or very like one. And she wasn’t alone. Not far from her was a crowd of people, looking about as if they too had just discovered themselves.
Movement in her peripheral vision drew her gaze, and she turned to see a wall of water before her. Glimmering, transparent, the rippling wall was without beginning or end in any direction, except for the sand floor. Through the wall of water, hovering in front of her was the shape of someone, his outline shimmering and shifting. Delight rippled through her. She knew that form; long and lean, shaped by the water moving over it. Distant beyond him, hazy through the water, was a vast number of people. She couldn’t make them out through the watery distance where they stood back, watching.
In front of her the figure she loved stretched an arm towards her, his hand stopping just short of the shimmering surface that divided them. She began to step towards him, then from among the people near her, someone spoke.
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
Skye looked and realised she knew the speaker.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” the woman with curly auburn hair repeated, her green eyes wide and her sweet freckled face concerned.
“I don’t know why I’m here either,” a dark-haired man near her agreed. His handsome face and intense blue eyes were alike enough to the younger man nodding beside him for them to be brothers.
Something about these three made Skye’s eyes fill with tears. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” she said.
A much younger woman, her blond hair sleek, stepped closer. “I don’t think so either,” She looked around, frowning, and others in the group nodded in perplexed agreement.
Skye looked at the wall of water, at the one she loved with his arm outstretched to her, and then realised that water covered her feet. She looked down, watching the water rise to her ankles, calves, knees. The sea was flooding the beach, rising all around them.
“Should we stay?” The auburn-haired woman asked Skye in the rising tide. “I’m not sure I want to.”
“Should we stay?” the younger of the two dark-haired men looked at Skye, “What do we do?”
Skye looked around at the thigh-deep sea, the shimmering wall of water, and at the uncertain faces around her. “Go back.”
“Back?”
She nodded, “Back. You don’t belong here.”
One by one they nodded. “Back.” A luminous light dawned in the chest of each. The lights pulsed and swelled, blooming inside them, flaring, obliterating detail.
“And you?” the woman asked, her features barely visible in the glow emanating from her chest, “Will you come?”
“No,” the water rose to Skye’s waist, to her ribcage. She turned to the shifting wall of water, to the beautiful one in front of her, “I’m exactly where I want to be.” She pressed her palm to the mirror-line of the seawater wall, to the palm of the one she loved. Each person around her dissolved in shards of light as the ocean turned to light and closed over her head.
Gradually the light faded, dulled to the palette of a grey stormy day. Through it the world resumed its familiar outlines. Her eyelids fluttered open to the slap and crash of water against rock, the cry of gulls around her. Cold wind slapped at her face and whipped a strand of dark hair against her cheek. Dark hair that belonged to the person in her arms.
His lips were a breath from hers, his silvery grey eyes watched her with such a depth of love that she felt she could sink through the rock with it, or be tossed by the wind that tangled their drying hair, dark and light, together.
Hunter.
He smiled, his eyes crinkling. Hers filled with tears. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him fiercely, desperately, planning to never let him go again. Ever. Hunter.
