Thomas walked through the granite garden, looking for an open grave. His mother’s grave. Cold air stung his face and seeped in around the collar of his coat. A chill sliced across his shoulder blades—part cold, part dread.

Trees dotted the landscape, their naked branches spearing the clouds. The sky above and the land below shared the bland, gray color he’d come to associate with winter in Ohio. Grass crunched under his feet and looked as desiccated as the bodies planted beneath it. Nothing was more depressing than a cemetery in winter. Would it look more alive with color? Was the sky really blue, while all he saw was gray? Were the gravestones a motley of different types of granite instead of the same dull color?

Was there beauty here while all he witnessed was drab and dreary?

It was so frustrating not being able to see what everyone else saw. As if the world had a secret and wouldn’t share it with him. He clenched his hands into fists.

Clng. Clng. Clng. The sound of metal clanging against metal sounded loud as a church bell in the quiet cemetery.

Across the endless sea of gravestones, Thomas spotted a canopy erected to protect the mourners from the elements. The fabric flapped and snapped in the wind. A metal grommet hitting one of the legs made the endless clng, clng, clng noise. The sounds grew in volume, became unnaturally loud. He reached up to cover his ears. But before he could get his hands into place, his vision winked out. Gone. Blackness.

He just stood there. Frozen. Not from fear, but from acceptance. He was blind, and he should be freaking out. But then, blinding himself had been something he’d contemplated in his darkest moments. He’d always thought blindness would grant him an odd sort of relief. No more gray existence, no more seeing the shadow of death. Ignorance really could be bliss, right? The only thing that had kept him from following through was not wanting to be dependent on anyone for anything.

Light flashed in his dark vision like far-off lightning. His sight blinked back on. Everything was the same. But everything had changed.

He still stood in Sundew Cemetery, but it was as if everything around him had faded into the background and a spotlight gleamed on a woman in front of him.

She stood no more than fifty feet away, a beacon of light, a burning flame that he couldn’t look away from.

Her body was bundled against the cold, her thick, black coat zipped up over her mouth with the hood pulled down over her forehead. The tiny bit of skin he saw was the palest of—his mind searched for the name of the right color—pale peach. Her skin was pale peach. Pale. Peach.

Holy motherfucking son of a bitch.

He saw color. Color. She brought vibrancy to his gray existence. And she carried no shadow of death. Not even a wispy hint. If love at first sight existed, he loved her for these gifts.

At this distance, it should be impossible to see the color of her eyes, but they were gold and shining right at him, locking him in place with their brilliance, their luminescence, and some ethereal quality that made him think of purity and perfection.

Call it instinct, call it pheromones, call it instant visceral attraction—his dick went hard.

“Thomas? Are you all right?” The question he’d been asked too much lately punched him in the head, breaking his attention on her.

Sound clicked back on. He heard the canopy flapping and the metal clanging. Almost as if his body was working in slow motion, he turned his head, absorbing a world that was alive with vitality for the first time. He felt like a kid who’d just learned to name colors. Brown grass. Green canopy. Red scarf.

Audie stood outside the canopy wearing the same getup as last night. Only now Thomas could see the hat and scarf and mittens were bright red.

Thomas raised his hand in a gesture somewhere between wait-a-minute, a wave, and what-the-hell.

Audie smiled, his wrinkled face conveying a wordless understanding. That was why Thomas always liked the guy. No explanations, no empty phrases needed. And it didn’t hurt that he looked like Gandalf.

Thomas turned back to the woman, but she no longer stood there. She was walking away, carrying an aura of color with her. The sky above her glowed a sweet, watery shade of blue, the grass under her feet a subtle tan, and the grave she passed was a pinkish granite. Holy shit. It was all so beautiful, but then his gaze locked on the erotic sway of her hips.

Without warning, his mind flashed him images of her in his bed and him being mesmerized by her golden eyes, her matching gilded hair, and all that creamy, warm skin surrounding him, holding him tight. Without ever seeing her face, he knew she would be beautiful, so lovely that it would hurt to gaze anywhere but upon her.

There was the before her part of his life. Now there was the after her part of his life. And he couldn’t let her go. He needed her in every sense of the word—emotionally, physically, sexually. He wanted to be underneath her, on top of her, inside her. He wanted to surround her, swallow her, take her into himself and keep her there. Forever. Always. A-fucking-men.

He ran after her, opening his mouth to shout her name, but… He didn’t know her name. Yet he felt like he should know it. And know her. She was his other piece. She completed him. Healed him.

Made up for all his deficiencies.

“Thomas? What are you doing?” Pastor Audie yelled. The concern and worry riding along the old man’s tone was more effective than diving headfirst into one of the granite markers dotting the cemetery.

What was he doing? Chasing after some random woman in the cemetery who obviously had no reaction to him. If she’d felt even an ounce of the connection he had, she wouldn’t be walking away.


He stopped running. But the urge to keep going pushed him forward a few more steps. He grabbed on to a gravestone to keep from following her. His heart rammed against his sternum so hard it threatened to knock him to the ground. It hurt—physically hurt—to watch her walk away, taking color and beauty with her, leaving him alone inside his gray existence once more. It felt like she’d amputated half of his soul, leaving him with the phantom pain of what could have been. A cold heaviness settled over him. He felt as dead as the stone he clung to.