He had lived for more than a hundred years.
Trapped behind glass, he watched me die in one life after another, then appear again with entirely new memories: forgetting him, falling in love with someone else, and dying all over again.
In my thirteenth life, he finally found a way to split off a fragment of his soul and go “outside” to be with me.
That fragment thought it was the whole of him. It thought it was the one who had killed me six times. It thought it was the one who had fallen in love with me.
But the real him could only watch through the glass as we embraced, kissed, and fought side by side.
He had never touched me once.
Until I killed that fragment with my own hands, until the glass shattered, until he stood before me, trembling as he reached out
“May I?”
he asked.
After waiting a hundred years, he finally dared to ask me that.
