Loving Lucifer [COMPLETE]

Chapter 13

"Please, Kate...it would mean a lot to me. I can understand why you would be apprehensive...but they're not all that bad..."

I sighed for the seventy seventh time throughout our conversation.

"Fine...but only because I love you."

His eyes widened and began to sparkle. His lips parted and formed a slight, serene smile.

"It's the first time you've said that," he said.

"I know." I smiled at him, and he bent down to kiss me.

We had been together for three months now. In the meantime, I had turned twenty-one. I was done with my mid-yearly tests, and all my grades had come in. Matt had started teaching Luke the basics of tinkering with cars. Sam had never spoken to Todd again. I still hadn't told Matt they'd broken up. And it had now been too long since their break-up for me to claim it had just never come up.

"This means the world to me..." he said, "To be able to show you my real home."

"Is it though?" I asked, crossing my arms at him.

"It has been for a very long time now..." he said, cupping my face in his hand, "For a very long time."

"How long?"

"Since the very beginning...it's a beautiful place, Catherine. It's a beautiful place that we built with our own bare hands. It's how we served the first ten years of our sentence."

"What are ten years to an immortal?"

"Ten years of self-hatred is a very long time, beautiful Kate." He caressed my cheek.

"Do you hate yourself?" I asked, suddenly feeling upset.

"Most of the time." He smiled sadly.

"I want to turn that to never," I replied, getting up on tiptoes and pressing my lips to his.

He smiled at me. "You know, this really means a lot to me."

"Don't milk it. I don't want to change my mind."

"No, please don't!"

I smiled at him. I still hadn't completely wrapped my head around what he had told me at the beginning of January, but I had finally accepted it as the truth. He took my hand in his and pressed it.

"So do you also not have a TV over at your house?"

"Are you kidding me? They would destroy me if I took away their electronics...especially the kids."

I smiled.

"You know, we lived through most of our lives without technology...now that we have it, we can't really go back."

"Understandable." I paused, "So who do you think I would like best?"

"Definitely Mo."

"Mo?"

He took in a deep breath and looked into my eyes, clearly about to embark on some kind of complicated explanation of sorts.

"When we fell, we all chose different names to live by on Earth...new identities, if you'd like. And we all decided to choose names we felt comfortable with; names closer to our own. None of us wanted to hang on to the names the Creator herself had given us, but they had constituted who we were our entire lives...and so, I chose Lucién...a French variant...as I had always admired France...it was different then, but I admired that country for hundreds upon hundreds of years...until I didn't anymore." He squeezed his eyes shut and it felt like he had gone through another Jason. I pressed his hand but, even though my stomach was in knots thinking he must have loved another girl the way he loved me now...perhaps much more, I didn't ask for more details. It was partly for him - because I knew what it was like not to be ready. But it was partly for me, because I didn't think I could handle him crying over somebody else. "Mo's real name was Paimon...and you'll love him. He's one of my best friends at home; he was young-ish. Not child young, but younger than most of us. I was twenty-six when we fell; he was only nineteen. Mo would be classified as a hipster in your modern-day slang...Apple devices, large plastic glasses, a mass of curly hair, a nose piercing, scarves, Spotify and Starbucks all the way. He's a walking talking encyclopaedia."