“ Will you come with me?Ah, Kestrel, that's something you never need to ask. ”
Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
~ Marie Rutkoski
She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.“Don’t wake up,” he said.
She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.
An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that it wasn’t how he had said it, and she was wrong, and she’d heard a question simply because the sound of him speaking her name made her wish that she were his answer.
