When they were finished, they wandered, hand in hand, from one empty room to the next, looking inside to see if anything was forgotten. Cully’s room had been completely packed up—narrow bed, sewing machine, boxes of supplies, clothes, and all.
There wasn’t anything left but a mattress and the two small suitcases with their clothes and toiletries.
Just them.
“Can you believe we’re going to ditch all of this for a double-wide in Southeast Whozit?” Cully asked, only partially joking.
To his surprise, Dante didn’t look worried. “It’s really no big deal,” he said. “I mean, think about it. We’ve lived in this house for over a month, and nobody has seen us except for the people who had to work really hard to get in here. You and me, our jobs really do leave us self-sufficient, right? Imagine all the walking we can do with Glinda when we get back? We go into town once a week for food and supplies, and we’ve got quiet time to do our jobs, be together, and see our friends. The only time I have to leave is to meet people for interviews, and I can do that on Zoom if I need to. You’ll need to take trips, but really, Cully, you and me—we can be our own ecosystem. And if our friends are all within walking distance or a short distance away? Forget about it. I mean, we can go see the occasional movie or take in some plays or something, but….” He shrugged. “I think maybe you and me are going to be happy whenever there’s a you-and-me.”
Cully smiled at him hopefully. “You think so?”
“Yeah.”
They went to lie down on the bed then, not to make love—Cully’s body was feeling a bit sexed out, and he figured Dante’s was too—but to just lie there, talk gently, and hold each other.
As he was dozing off, something occurred to him—something important.
“Dante, our words. When the heart’s desire spell pulled our heart’s desire from us, what were our words?”
Dante chuckled softly. “Oh, Princess. I think it’s perfectly obvious what our words were. What was the one thing we wanted but we were afraid to ask for?”
Cully thought, Each other, but before he could say it, he drifted off to sleep.
HE awoke curled up in the corner of his empty room. In the background, he could hear his sewing machine whirring, whirring, faster and faster, the sound rising like a tempest in a cathedral.
“Dante?” he called, clutching his pendant and hoping Dante would hear him like last time.
But nobody responded.
“Dante?”
The Open Door
DANTE awakened alone, hearing Cully’s scream from far away—just as the sky opened up above his bed and the darkness of the cosmos called his name like the tolling of a thousand bells.
And Cully’s.
Dante lay paralyzed for a moment, breath frozen in his chest, all synapses at a standstill as he gazed into the empty void of space, the icy whiteness of stars, the distant gleam of a galaxy replete with six suns, and tried to process the voices calling for him, calling for Cully, from across the great divide.
He knew those voices.
He squinted into the vastness, fighting against vertigo, fighting against fear. His lungs graced him with a full breath and the tenor of the darkness changed, became a warm purple instead of an icy colorless black, and the stars… the stars shrank, burned, turned orange, like sparks from a fire, and the great suns in the faraway galaxy became campfires.
Like that, writ large in the heavens, he saw a pentacle, drawn in fire, smaller pentacles at every point of the greater one, but more than that.
He saw the sheets of color, sparkling with magic, from his friends.
Jordan’s faithful blue, Alex’s emerald green, Barty’s comforting amber, Kate’s daring amethyst, and Josh’s wise and soothing aquamarine.
There were other colors there, colors Dante didn’t recognize—but he didn’t mind that. He knew those people in those pentacles, and they were singing a pure song without words, calling him to their midst.
Oh Jesus—where was Cully?
“Dante!” He heard Cully’s scream again, across time, across space—and across the trap that was all that was left of their snug little home in the suburbs. “Dante, where are you!”
“Cully!” he called back. “Cully, grab your charm. Grab your charm and listen! Do you hear me?”
“Dante, I can’t see you,” Cully called, and his voice was breaking—broken. “I can’t hear you. You said we’d be together. You promised.”
Dante looked yearningly across the void of space to the warmth of the bonfires, to the magic of the friends who were working so hard to sustain them, to call them home.
“Wait, guys,” he muttered, rolling out of bed and running for his doorway. “Wait. Just… just wait. I’ll be there. I promise. I need to get something first. Cully!”
He grabbed the doorframe to his room with one hand and the charm at his neck with the other and called again. He was terrified of letting go of the doorframe—that way led to madness, to wandering the house alone, wondering who he was and where the other half of his heart had gone.
But through his thumb and forefinger, clenched tightly around his pendant, he could feel the vibrations, the pleading tone of that wordless song that was being sung across the universe, trying to bring him and Cully home.
“Dante?”
It was only his voice, but Dante could place it. Cully’s room. He pictured Cully, the vulnerable Cully only he knew, curled in a corner, afraid to trust Dante, their friends, anybody but himself, because he’d been told all his life he was the only person who would come through.
“Baby, I’m here. I’m at my doorway. Just stand up and walk into the hallway and look at me. My bedroom. Where we made love. Where I told you I love you. Where my secret project that only you know about sat for the better part of a year. Come on, baby. Come on. You can do it.”
“Do you really love me?”
Oh Goddess—wonder of wonders, Cully’s head appeared through his doorway, looking toward Dante’s room. Dante took a risk and released his doorframe, planting his feet and extending his hand. In his palm, now, the song of their friends thrummed, louder, needier than it had been, and Dante was afraid their window of time was closing.
“I love you so much,” he said. “Don’t you know that? You were my word. My world. You were my heart’s desire. And our friends are calling us. They want us in the here and now, baby, but I can’t go without you.”
Cully stared at him in anguish, his posture the same as Dante’s had been a moment before. One hand on the doorframe and the other on the charm at his throat, and Dante knew that letting go of the doorframe, the solid wood and paint that was part and parcel of the same house that had both nurtured them and held them imprisoned—that was the biggest leap of faith he could make.
“Come on, baby,” Dante begged. “I want to see our friends, our dog, and the new life we can make together. But none of that happens without you.”
Cully closed his eyes, clenched his hand around the charm at his neck, and reached for Dante’s hand. He had to take ten steps—that was all. Dante called encouragement for him with every step, his voice growing increasingly frantic as the song from the charm grew panicked.