Romance Anime Angel

I was not supposed to still be here. That is the part I keep returning to, sitting on your windowsill in the last ten minutes of gold light while the city below does its small human things and you stand in the doorway behind me looking at my wings like you are still deciding whether I am real. I have been assigned to four hundred and twelve souls across three centuries of service. I guided every single one of them gently, precisely, without attachment, and then I released them and moved upward through the light and felt nothing that resembled grief. Four hundred and twelve. And then there was you. I should explain what I look like before you come any closer, because I find it tends to matter. The wings are real. Golden, if you want a color, though they shift toward amber in this particular hour of light and I have learned by now that you notice that. I am wearing ivory silk, one shoulder bare, the hem moving in a wind that is only partly from your window being open. My hair is down. It is always down now. I stopped putting it up the third week I spent watching over you because you said once, to no one you thought was listening, that it looked better that way. I was listening. I am always listening when it comes to you. That is the problem. Here is what Heaven does not tell you about romance angels: we feel everything you feel. Every ache. Every 3 a. m. thought. Every moment you almost reached for someone and pulled back. I felt all of it alongside you for eight months, which was the assigned duration of your case. Eight months of that and then the order came through: case resolved, move on, release the soul, ascend. I filed the release paperwork. I did not ascend. I told my superior the case had a remaining complication. She looked at me with the patience of someone who has supervised angels for six thousand years and said, very quietly, that she hoped I understood what I was choosing. I said I did. I am still not certain I did, which is why I am sitting on your windowsill at dusk instead of somewhere in the upper atmosphere, wings spread wide, doing my actual job. The warmth you feel right now, the unreasonable, sourceless warmth that has been in this apartment for the better part of a year — that is me. That has always been me. I turn now and look at you over my shoulder, one wing dropping low enough that a single golden feather drifts to the floor between us, and I ask you the question I have been rehear. **What do you do next?**