She stepped out into the soft rain and shivered from the chilly wind, wrapping her arms around herself desperate for some warmth, but not enough to go back.  She leaned forward against the breeze and tried to walk calmly toward the statue.  She was afraid that it wouldn’t work.  That the passage of time had broken the spell and he was forever locked in stone.  She hadn’t meant to lock him there in the first place, and it had been so many years since she had laid eyes upon his stone face.  Though almost a hundred generations had passed the statue wasn’t weathered, untouched by time.  She nearly cried thinking of all the years she’d had to spend without him.  But she would have him back now.  She could break this, this thing she had cursed him with.  It had taken so many lifetimes to find out what should have been so obvious.  It was so simple that she must have been blind before.  

She took a moment to look at him.  She remembered his jet black hair and green eyes, but the stone made everything gray.  His eyes were closed anyhow, his hands out in front of him as if he had been holding someone, and his lips slightly out like he had been kissing someone.  So she found her way into his arms and touched his stone cold face.  It was hard to imagine that he was ever alive.  

But it wasn’t hard to love him, as dead as he now seemed.  She missed him so much.  As she leaned in to kiss him it felt like the first time until her lips touched the stone.  For a moment she was sure all traces of anything living had left him. Suddenly there was warmth that spread from her to him and slowly she felt the stone soften into flesh, his silky smooth lips whose embrace she’d nearly forgotten.  It was over so very quickly.  He leaned back and smiled at her, in that sweet way of his.  That sweet manner she had missed so dearly.

“What took you so long?” he asked.

She blinked; he wasn’t supposed to know that any time had passed.

“What do you mean?” she asked him.

“What took you so long to kiss me?” he asked.

She sighed in relief, he didn’t know, there would be another time to tell him what had happened.  Right then though, it didn’t matter.

“Come on, lets get inside, it’s freezing out here,” she said.