Coco had literally gone to the ends of the universe to forget about Marcus.

At the beginning it wasn’t easy because it seems that if you look hard enough, even in a land as disparate as Bovo Kan, you will find something to remind you. In Bovo Kan, it was the drinking vessels, like the stupid shot glass Marcus carried in his pack. In Tysquit-Tano, it was the ubiquitous neck tattoos, like his of a Celtic symbol. In Ohari, it was the voices of the singers, men with music in their souls, like him.

But here, on a planet she cannot pronounce, she has found peace from the tumultuous emotions she associates with him. On its windswept beach, with crystalline sea, she sits sipping a local beverage of ingredients with no meaning to her. Free, finally free.

“Coco?”

The sound of his baritone launches a whirlpool in her mind. All of her uncertainty rises to the forefront.

His dark eyes gaze down at her as if she were a miracle. She’s seen that look before and knows that unless he’s made a decision, she’ll be lost again.

“I’ve missed you,” he says.

“That’s because I haven’t been around.”

He smiles. “I was muddled before.”

“You’re not now?”

He shrugs, smiles off-handedly in that way that both makes her cringe and salivate. “Not about you. Not anymore.”

Sighing, she shuts down the hologram. Maybe after another ten years clarity will return.

end 4/4/2017

S. Darlington