Page 171 of Ghost Ribbon

My fingers didn’t have the strength to grip. They were losing their power. They were running out of the fundamental energy that hands need to hold. “Later.”

He trembled against my palm.

I felt it through my fingers. He was afraid.

“Let me look at you a little longer.” My throat was closing around the words. My lungs were producing less and less air for speech. Each word cost something, and I was spending what I had left on him.

His breath hitched and I think I saw his eyes turn wet.

The moisture gathering at the edges.

He kissed my palm.

The one that was still resting against his cheek. His lips pressed into the center of it. The kiss was so reverent that it felt like something being sealed. “I love your smile,” I said. “So much.” My eyes were getting hazy and I could barely stand.

He was holding me steady now with his hands on my waist. He was the only thing between me and the ground.

“Promise me you’ll keep it.”

I have never begged life for anything. It has taken too much for me to believe it would ever give something back. But if I could ask for one small mercy, I would ask it to leave Alexei’s smile untouched. Let every sorrow find me before it finds him.

“Don’t do this, okay?” His lower lip trembled and I think he was struggling not to fall to his knees. “Let’s go back. I’ll call the doctor.”

I smiled because the alternative was crying, and I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want the last thing he saw on my face to be grief. I didn’t want the last expression I wore in this world to be something that would haunt him. I wanted him to remember me smiling. I wanted the last image he had of me to be happy.

“Will you find me again?” I raised my shaky hand and I pointed up at the sky.

“You have to look up there,” my voice was so weak I didn’t know if he could hear me. “To one of the holes that poke through the dark. I’ll look back, I promise.”

We will find each other in the stars.

We will never be apart.

I felt him breathing so harshly, like an animal threatened to be killed. He was struggling not to collapse.

Even though I was the one who was dying. I was the one whose breath was going away. “Keep your smile.”

For me.

For the boy you were before me. For the man you became because of me.

Keep it.

Don’t let it die with me.

Don’t let the void take it back.

“If you want my smile to stay,” he said, and each word was a fight, each word was something he was dragging out of himself through force, “then you have to stay. You’re the reason for it.”

“I’m always here.” I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart. The heart that had been beating for him his entire life and that had, when he offered it, been willing to stop beating so that mine could continue.

I leaned on my tiptoes, with all my strength, with one last act of love that my body was capable of producing.

“I will always be here.”

Then I pressed my lips to his.

And my last breath went through his mouth.