Your unspoken promise of angst and pain for these two, coupled with their undeniable mutual attraction, makes me think that they'll have a very difficult time ahead.
I've been letting Annie take point on the responses so far -- she wrote 90%+ of this story, yet was kind enough to name me as cowriter when I was more like a Beta Reader On Steroids (OK, OK, a BR who would do ridiculous over-stepping things like "How about if they did this?" and then just add several paragraphs into the main story file, or "I had thoughts about the story; what do you think of something like this?" and send Annie a few pages
) -- but this comment just had me in stitches.
First of all, welcome back, Terry! We're absolutely delighted you popped back in and have been enjoying this story. We really do think you'll enjoy it.
But WHERE, OH WHERE, do we promise angst and pain in this story?
I do not remember promising any such thing, and we're both totally cracking up over this expectation.
I don't want to spoil too much ... but I can promise that while interesting things will happen in the story (at least, we find them to be interesting things!), I can also say that this universe has been our happy place for the several months that we've been working on it, and we hope that, when it's over, it will become a happy place universe for a lot of our readers, as well.
I'll also just add here that we are SO HAPPY that others have been enjoying coming on this journey with us. As Annie mentioned in an earlier comment, we've been saying for months -- as the story file got longer and longer and LONGER, such that we finally decided to break it up into a trilogy rather than dump a 100 part story on you all
-- that even if no one else ever reads it, we've had SO MUCH FUN writing it for ourselves. But to have others enjoying it with us has definitely been the icing on the cake.
