He is so tense beneath her wandering mouth, carved sharp and stoic from dark obsidian. It is a reflex when she pushes harder, further, following that line of stiff muscle across his jaw and along his neck, past his shoulder and down to the soft skin behind his elbow. She has not forgotten his presence at the beach, has not forgotten how he stayed with her the night to curl around her in the dark, to hold her broken pieces together when all she knew how to do was fall apart like dust in the wind. She had been so broken then, so broken still, but it had been him who stopped those great fissuring chasms from undoing her completely.
“Offspring.” She says again, presses something like a kiss, something dark and ugly and sharp enough that she should worry it will flay him open, to the impossibly soft skin behind his foreleg.
She is quiet when he turns to look at her, when he uses the knowledge of the secrets she had just shared with him to peel away the layers of a mask that had become her new face, her true face. He finds a tension that matches his own, identical furrows drawn in their cheeks like the furrows left behind in the sand from long, splayed fingers. Then his lips are against her neck, following the currents of smooth corded muscle that take him deeper into the blue oceans of her rippling body.
Stop this. A voice whispers, but it is neither his nor hers and so it falls upon deaf ears as they sink dangerously deeper into the wounds that bind them together.
He is ragged when he speaks again, breathes his brokenness into her skin in a way that makes her flesh tighten and quiver and ache with what she has lost, with the memory of other words, other whispers, other lips pressed to such eager blue. I feel like I am losing my mind most of the time, he confesses even as her mouth returns to his skin, needing movement, needing something to distract her from the grinning dark that blossomed suddenly in the pit of her belly. “Not lost,” she says quietly, tracing the slashes of pink scars with a strange rigidity, “stolen, maybe.”
Something knots and clenches in her belly, a warning, an echo, so she starts to turn away from him, away from the brokenness of his face and the need in those gleaming eyes, away so that he will not notice the same reflected back on her own indigo face. You’re here now, he says and stops her, speaking softer than the damp starlight around them, tell me it was real.
He presses close again and she does not push him away, taking instead a knot of his mane between her teeth and pulling him deliberately closer. She knows what it is to doubt like this, to lose faith in the veracity of a memory that seems false and strange and entirely impossible. She knows what it is to be hunted through sleep by beasts from the ugly beyond, by the things that can’t be, couldn’t be, and yet are. “It was real.” She tells him quietly, honestly, knowing exactly what it is he needs to hear, wishing she’d had someone to do the same for her years ago. “Not a dream, you aren’t crazy.”
She is gentle when she brushes his forelock aside, uncharacteristically soft when she, despite the vast differences in their sizes, pulls his neck down and his head against her chest where she can hold him quietly against the beating of a very real, very wild heart. “There was a man,” she starts for him quietly, opening an old wound so that the infection can drain and he can finally begin to heal, safely, pressed so close to her like this, “he made you someone you are not, remade you for himself.” She presses empty kisses along the curve of his dark, beautiful neck, shifts again to pull him closer still, possessive.
When his mouth finds hers and there is only heat, only want, she caves to him, softens beneath his touch until her eyes are dark and round and wretched, beautiful in their wanting treachery as she pulls back to let them wander drunkenly across the plains of his quiet face. “Offspring.” She says, she whispers, confused that it sounds so much like an invitation when she meant to ask it like a question. So she finds a second name, clutches it in sad, broken hands, brandishes it like a sword between them because even now her mind wanders where it shouldn’t, wants what it must not have. “Isle.”
MALIS
makai x oksana