Tabula Rasa

By S. Faith, © 2009, 2010

Total words: 146,260.
This part: 326.
Rating: M / R
Summary, Disclaimer, Notes, etc.: Please see the Prologue.

Epilogue

She wasn't there.

He sat up, called out her name. He got no response. He pushed back the covers and padded out of the bedroom to find her. "Bridget?" he called again. Still no answer.

He could see a faint light from the first floor; she was in the sitting room, but the light was too steady, too weak to be the telly. Furrowing his brows, he went down to her, found her sitting at her laptop in the otherwise dark room, her eyes fixed on the screen, wide and unblinking.

"What are you doing?" he asked sleepily.

"I found this CD earlier," she said, holding it up; for the last week or so, they had been sorting through her things brought out of storage. He knew exactly what was on that disc, labelled only with a B in his own handwriting. "I meant to look at it, then forgot, then woke and couldn't sleep. Only one file on there, and it was called—"

"'Novel!!'," he supplied. "With two exclamation points."

"Yes," she said, her eyes not leaving the screen, still scanning back and forth. "The novel I was writing."

He nodded, then added, "Yes. Were you reading it?"

"I was," she said. "I stopped."

"Why?"

She looked up at him at last. "I didn't need to read anymore," she said. "I started to write."

He blinked rapidly in his disbelief. "You what?"

"Mark, I remember," she said, a grin spreading across her face. "I remember how it ends."

She resumed typing away like mad on the laptop's keyboard, attention completely focused on the screen; seeing her so passionately engaged in something she had loved so much took his breath away in a rush, and he felt tears flooding his eyes as he smiled broadly. He sat beside her, taking her roughly in his arms, surprising her. "Oh, love," he said, his voice thick with emotion, "you can finally write the end of the story."

The end.