He knows me too well, Morgan thought. Hunter was feeling her uneasiness, her sadness, her regret.
"Are you ill?"
Morgan shook her head and tucked a few bangs behind one ear. "No-I'm okay. It's just-I needed to see you. To talk to you."
"It's always too long between times," Hunter said. "Sometimes I go crazy with it."
Morgan looked into his eyes, saw the flare of passion and longing that made her throat close and her stomach flutter.
"Me too," Morgan said, seizing the opening. "But even though it's making us crazy, we seem to be able to see each other less and less."
"Too true," Hunter said, rubbing his hand over his chin and the days' worth of stubble there. "This has not been a good year for us."
"Well, it's been good for us separately," Morgan said. "You're practically running the New Charter yourself, setting up offices all over the world, working with the others on guidelines. What you're doing is incredibly important. It's going to change how witches interact with each other, with their communities…." She shook her head. The old council was now barely more than a symbolic tradition. Too many witches had objected to its increasingly autonomous and even secretive programs to search out witches who were misusing magickal power. In response to that, Hunter and a handful of other witches had created the New Charter. It was less a policing organization than a support system to rehabilitate errant witches without having their powers stripped. It now included improving witches' standings in their communities, education, public relations, help with historical research. Wicca was being pulled into the twenty-first century, thanks in large part to Hunter.
"There's no way you could stop now," Morgan said. "And me… Belwicket is becoming more and more important to me. I really see my future as being there. It supports the work I want to do with healing, and maybe someday I could become high priestess-a Riordan leading Belwicket again."
Morgan's birth mother, Maeve Riordan, had died when Morgan was a baby. If she had lived, she would have been high priestess of her clan's ancestral coven, Belwicket, just as her mother, Mackenna, had, and her mother before her.
"Is that what you'll be happy doing?" Hunter asked.
"It seems to be my destiny," Morgan responded, her fingers absently rubbing the cuff of his sweater. Just as you are, she thought. What did it mean to face two destinies that led in opposite directions? "And yes, it makes me happy. It's incredibly fulfilling, being part of the coven that my birth mother would have led. Even though we're now on the other side of Ireland from the original one, the whole experience is full of my family's history, my relatives, people I never had a chance to know. But it means I stay there, commit myself to staying in Cobh, commit myself to making my life there for the foreseeable future."
"Uh-huh," Hunter said, a wariness coming into his eyes.
Now that she had gotten this far, Morgan forced herself to press on. "So I'm there. And you're… everywhere. All over. Meanwhile we're seeing each other every four months for six hours. In an airport." She looked around. "Or a tea shop."
"You're leading up to something," Hunter said dryly.
Over the last four years she and Hunter had talked about the distance between them many times. Each conversation had been horrible and heartbreaking, but they had never managed to resolve anything. They were soul mates; they were meant to love each other. But how could they do that when they were usually a continent apart? And how could that change when each of them was dedicated, and rightfully so, to their life's work?
Morgan didn't see any way to make it work. Not without one of them giving up their chosen path. She could give up Belwicket and follow Hunter around the world while he worked for the New Charter. But she feared that the joy of being with him would be tempered by her frustration of not pursuing her own dream and her guilt that she was letting down her coven-and even her birth mother, whom she'd never known. And then what good would she be to Hunter? She didn't want to make his life miserable. And if she asked him to give up the New Charter and stay with her in Ireland, he would be in the same position-thrilled to be with her, torn that he couldn't be true to a meaningful calling of his own. She couldn't ask him to do that.
Breaking up-for good-seemed like the fairest thing for both of them. She wanted Hunter to be happy above all else. If she set him free, he would have the best chance of that. Even though the idea of never holding him, kissing him, laughing with him, even just sitting and looking at him again seemed almost like a living death, still, Morgan believed it was for the best, ultimately. There seemed to be no way for them to be together; they had to do the best they could on their own.
Back at home Colm Byrne, a member of Belwicket, had confessed he was in love with her. She liked him and he was a great guy, but he wasn't her muirn beatha dan. There was no way he would ever touch what she felt for Hunter, and she wasn't breaking up with Hunter to be with Colm or anyone else, for that matter. This wasn't about that. This was about freeing herself and Hunter to give all of themselves to their work and freeing them from the pain of constantly longing for these achingly brief reunions.
"Hunter-I just can't go on like this. We can't go on like this." Her throat tightened and she released his hand. "We need to-just end it. Us."
Hunter blinked. "I don't understand," he said. "We can't end us. Us is a fact of life."
"But not for the lives we're living now." Morgan couldn't even look at him.
"Morgan, breaking up isn't the answer. We love each other too much. You're my muirn beatha dan-we're soul mates."
That did it. A single tear escaped Morgan's eye and rolled down her cheek. She sniffled.
"I know," she said in frustration. "But trying to be together isn't working either. We never see each other, our lives are going in two different directions-how can we have a future? Trying to pretend there is one is bogging us both down. If we really, really say this is it, then we'll both be free to do what we want, without even pretending that we have to take the other one into consideration."
Hunter was silent, looking first at Morgan, then around at the little tea shop, then out the black window with the rain streaking down.
"Is that what you want?" he asked slowly. "For us to go our own separate ways without even pretending we have to think of each other?"
"It's what we're already doing," Morgan said, feeling as if she was going to break apart from grief. "I'm not saying we don't love each other. We do-we always will. I just can't take hoping or wishing for something different. It's not going to be different." That was when her voice broke. She leaned her head against her hand and took some deep breaths.
Hunter's finger absently traced a pattern on the tabletop, and after a moment Morgan recognized it as a rune. The rune for strength. "So we'll make lives without each other, we'll commit to other people, we won't ever be lovers again."
His quiet, deliberate words felt like nails piercing her heart, her mind. Goddess, just get me through this. Get me through this, she thought. Morgan nodded, blinking in an unsuccessful attempt to keep more tears from coming to her eyes.
"That's what you want." His voice was very neutral, and Morgan, knowing him so well, knew that meant huge emotions were battling inside him.
"That's what we have already," she whispered. "This is not being lovers. I don't know what this is."
"All right," Hunter said. "All right. So you want me to settle down, is that it? In Cobh? Make a garden with you? Get a cat?" His voice didn't sound harsh-more despairing, as if he were truly trying to understand.
"That's not what I'm saying," Morgan said, barely audibly. "I want you to do what you want to do, what you need to do. I want you to be happy, to be fulfilled. I'm saying that I know that won't be with me in Cobh, with a garden and a cat." She brushed the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes.