" "I don’t want this to be all that there is for us,” Gerard says in a voice so quiet that I can barely hear it above the soft, lapping roar of the waves.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve just moved so fast. December, January, February, March, April, May, June. July now. That’s only just eight months. Out of twenty-seven years of my life, I have known you for only a little less than eight months. And still I can’t help feel that I’ve been here so much longer, years and years and years.” He pauses thoughtfully. “How much longer until the disease takes that away?”

I gulp back something hard and jagged inside of my throat. “I don’t know,” I tell him truthfully. “I’ve had it for nearly two years and I’m okay. Some people live for decades.”

“Decades. That’s not enough time. In two decades you will be forty years old. You’ll have barely lived your life at all.”

“We’re living right now, aren’t we?”

Gerard still looks skeptical. He twists his head so that he’s looking at me as I rise up on my knees. Sand clings to my shivering body and I am coated in it like a second skin. “I’ll never see you in wrinkles,” he whispers, smiling almost painfully as he lifts his hand to touch my cheek.

“Close your eyes.”

He obeys without delay. I cup his hand in my own, guiding the tips of his fingers along the planes of my face. They are gritty with sand against my skin, and the shiver that passes through my limbs has nothing to do with the water or the air. A few shy beams of sunlight filter through the clouds and warm my back. “This is the end of the story, okay, Gerard? At the end you are laying on the beach and the sun is coming up and out of everything you have ever experienced in your life, all you can remember is how beautiful every single moment of it was.” My voice is soft and low as I let the words flow past my lips. I close my eyes too. “Can you feel my skin?”

“Yes,” he says raggedly.

“I can feel your skin, Gerard. You don’t even know it, but years have passed by, both of us sitting here, and everybody realizes that we’re gone. My mom and dad and Savannah and Lia and Mikey. Mikey realizes it first, you know. But neither of us are dead, and he knows it, so he doesn’t worry about you. He knows you’re happy, everyone who knows us knows that wherever we are, we are so, so happy. And there’s you, and there’s me. We’ve been sitting here in the sand all of our lives, and we stayed healthy and we lived in your Nana’s cottage until we grew old.”

“How old?”

“One hundred and twelve,” I chuckle. “We’re old and we smell and sometimes we can’t remember things so well. Can you still feel my skin?”

“Yeah.”

“I can still feel your skin, Gerard. And you know what I feel?”

“Wrinkles.”

“A million of them. Every single one of them is beautiful because it tells the story of your life, you know. Your eyes have gone soft and your lips, they’re softer than ever.”

“You’ve got wrinkles too?”

“A million of them,” I tell him, “Maybe even more. But it doesn’t matter because when I look at you I see you exactly as you are: amazingly perfect and handsome. And I am so, so lucky to have lived my entire life with someone as wonderful as you.”

Gerard’s hands search out the imaginary lines on my face, tracing over my closed eyelids and pausing at my lips. I know without seeing that he has opened his eyes. He guides my face closer to his, and kisses me with so much feeling that I wonder if we both just might explode.

“You amaze me,” he says.

I open my eyes."