— I'll break you a hundred different ways —
For a moment, he tenses at the feel of her pressing closer against him. He can feel her lips as they brush across the silver feathers of his wings, and it sends an odd shiver along the ridge of his spine. It wasn’t often that he touched anyone, and it was even less often that he was touched back. There was something about her that shattered nearly everything he thought he had known about himself, and the longer he stands alongside of her, the more confused and enchanted he becomes.
He knows it is the bones that plate her body that drew him in. He wants her to know, wants her to see him in what he considered to be his truest form, but he has no way to put it into words. When he tears his gaze from her face long enough to look at the horizon, he can see that the sun is low in the sky. Not quite twilight, but close enough that it tightens the coil of anticipation that sat in his gut. There is a war being waged inside himself, between wanting to leave her here on the shores and escape to the safety of solitude, and yet also simultaneously wanting to stay, to let her see.
His internal conflict sets his jaw into a hard line, but the feel of her tongue against his shoulder and then the brush of her antlers near his withers draws him back. He is perplexed at first by the look of sorrow and apology in her sea-colored eyes, and at how he notices how empty his side feels without her there. Not even realizing he’s doing it, he traces her backwards footsteps until the gap between them disappears again, until his chest is nearly to hers. With a lowered head, his lips touch against her cheek, and then move up to rest at the soft skin behind her ear. “I know I’m not wrong.”
He does not withdraw this time. There is a gnawing, relentless hunger in his gut, one that tells him to just take her and make her his in every way imaginable, but he smothers that monster with the softness of her eyes. Instead, he placates himself with continuing to touch her face and neck, his lips caressing against both skin and bone, the metallic taste of her blood lingering on his tongue. “I can show you something, to make you understand why I don’t think you’re terrible.” The rumble of his voice could have almost made the words sound threatening, but the way his touch is still so light against her skin betrays the roughness of the gravel in his voice. “But you have to trust me.”
— and I'll make you remember my face —
