so we let our shadows fall away like dust
I’m sorry, Luster, he says in a quiet way, pressing a kiss to the arch of her neck, that was careless of me. Her brow furrows and she pulls away from him in an instant, stepping back so he can see the quiet, the soft of that delicate blue face. “No.” She reaches for him so gently, sweeps aside the dark of his forelock so her lips can leave a lingering kiss against the forehead below. “Don’t be sorry,” she whispers, closes her eyes and lets her mouth trail lower, lips warm in the hollow of his thin, elegant cheeks, claiming him in a quiet way with the heat of her kisses, “I’m not.”
She ducks under his chin again, lets it trail lightly along the ridge of her spine, pauses only when it comes to rest in the hollows of her soft, blue hip. Her own mouth settles just behind his shoulder, just behind the bleeding ridge of a bone plate where she reaches for the smooth black warmth of his skin, for the soft against his belly and behind his elbow. She nurses the wounds reflexively, suckling until the skin is soft and clean and all she can taste is him in every breath. He moans again, buries it in the soft of her mane and even she is surprised at the way her body arches beneath him when he takes her skin between his teeth, pulling and pinching until she is breathless and uncertain and pressed so firmly against him.
It is reflexive when she reaches for the name he has not given her, when those pale lips shape around nothing and she can only smother a strange, quiet kind of laugh in the soft hollow of his skin. “Your name, please.” She asks again in that breathless way, soft and still smiling, lighter now, uncrossing those arms from her chest and reaching for him. She doesn’t expect him to suddenly change his mind and breathe the word into the blue oceans of her roiling skin, but she has to try, has to ease this strange ache he keeps nursing deeper into the pit of her chest. At some point her breathing had changed, ragged in a quiet way, stuttered and uncertain, and so she distracts herself in the contours of his body, following the maze of bone ridges and plates until she is at the point of his hip and kissing it softly.
She returns to his chest, tells him he should’ve stayed. But he pulls back to stare at her and she can feel her face darken with uncertainty at him. No, he tells her, coaxes a frown from the bright and white, you would have been hurt so much worse with me. She isn’t sure what he means until his eyes drift to the scar on her neck, his mark, and she can nearly see him wilt beneath the weight of his guilt. It’s in his skin and his shoulders, in the contours of that dark, beautiful face – pain and remorse, and then only nothing when he pulls it back and hides it from her. “Don’t do that,” she says quietly, steps forward to touch his face with such opening, disarming longing, asking of him what she has no right to ask, asking of him what will only push him further away, “don’t hide from me.”
You shouldn’t even be here with me now. Or ever.
Frustration makes her tense as she reaches a second time for the name he still hasn’t given her. Something to keep him from pulling away so far, from escaping to a place she cannot reach. How could she be without him now, away from his warmth and his gentle and the strange way he seems to care about her. How could he not see how desperately she needed him. “Where should I be?” She is softening again, unraveling in those eyes, in the goosebumps that still prickle her skin where his teeth had been. “Where do I belong?” She is wide-eyed and luminous when she slips beneath his neck again, lays her face so quietly against his neck and closes her eyes, wills him not to force her away from him. “I think it would hurt so much worse to be without you, right now.”
He closes his eyes and reaches for her and she turns to him easily, pushes her face against his lips, her shoulder against his. Come, love, he whispers into her skin, her neck, her jaw. It is so different than before, he is so different, or maybe she is so different – but the word has a new kind of weight now and she responds to it with a kiss against the blue of his celestial mouth instead of frowning fear.Come home with me. Just for a while. You can leave whenever you want. Her surprise blooms slowly across the quiet blue of that delicate face, startled that he chooses to pull her closer instead of push her further away. The yes is already on her lips when his eyes drop and another word tips so softly from the ledge of his lips. Please.
She comes undone in his gentleness, soft-eyed and needing, using her nose to lift his chin again, to reclaim his eyes with the quiet pleasure of her own. “Yes.” She tells him so softly, so sweetly, wonders at the feeling unfurling like blue petals in her chest. “With you.” She cannot keep her lips from tasting the quiet in his face, cannot help but reach into his dark with every bit of light she can manage, to find him there and weave around him like a beacon in his roiling seas. She is suddenly so quiet when she lifts her face to him, when her eyes find his and settle so readily against the dark. “Give me something to hold on to.”
