The setting was wrong, with a starbucks cup and a few muffin crumbs left on a porcelain plate at the small table on the busy cafe. But it was her; Dorian knew the moment he laid eyes on her. Her hair curling dark around her pale face, her red dress accentuating each curve, her intense concentration on the book that lay before her. It was his Angelique, after all this time - she was right in front of him.
"Can it be you that I hear?" he breathed as he moved closer, drinking in every line of the form that was so familiar and achingly unknown; "Let me view you, then, standing as when I drew near to the town where you would wait for me- yes, as I knew you then, even to the original blood-red gown!"
"Thomas Hardy." she said, surprised, as she looked up, and it was her soul gazing at him from those eyes. "But you got the dress wrong." She sounded almost smug. So like her, when she for once managed to catch him making an error.
"Not a lot of people know him these days."
"He is one of my favorites."
"Really?" Her smile was bright; it was just as he remembered but untempered by the sorrow that had been there before, the bitterness of a cruel existence.
"I prefer Poe." she went on, "Father says I was named after one of his poems."
"I am afraid I was named after myself. Dorian. Dorian Grey." He bowed briefly as had once been the correct way to greet a lady, realising too late how odd it must seem. But she kept on smiling.
"Dorian Grey" As she held out her hand for him to shake, but he bent over it, pressing a kiss to her soft skin. She smelled of rosemary and some flower he could not recall the name of, just as she had then. Her hand laid in his just as he remembered. "I am-"
"Annie" he breathed as he looked up at her.
Her brow furrowed, perplexed.
"How did you know?"
He pressed her hand to his cheek and a glimmer of recognition passed through her eyes.
"Do you not remember?" He whispered.
Her hand shook where it rested against his face.
"I… I don't know, I-"
He looked into her familiar eyes, eyes that knew and feared to know.
"But my heart it is brighter, than all of the many stars in the sky, for it sparkles with Annie . It glows with the light of the love of my Annie - with the thought of the light of the eyes of my Annie."
Angelique looked at him from out of Annie's eyes.
And she knew him.
Poems quoted:
The voice by Thomas Hardy
For Annie by Edgar Allen Poe
