she'll lie and steal and cheat and beg you from her knees
make you thinks she means it this time
They are trapped within this moment that is at once impossible in its strength as it is in its fragility. She can feel the steel of him underneath it all along with the spiderweb of her faith, the thing that clings her to him ripping away with the moments, leaving her as breathless as if she had just run for miles.
Her muscles ache and she breathes him in, steadied by his presence even as she remains off-kilter by it. She wants to stay here forever. She wants to run. She wants to be his. She wants to be free. All of these war within her, and her body is taut with the need to make a decision—to do anything but rest in silence.
His expert hands dismantle the last of her defenses though and she is stripped vulnerable before him, her blue eyes raw with emotion, her face scrubbed clean of pretense. “I want to stay,” her voice is hoarse, as if she had spent the last hours screaming—and maybe she has. “But all I know how to do is leave.”
It’s all her family has ever known.
She was raised by a mom who had constantly picked up the pieces in the wake of her father, trailing behind and keeping their family together through sheer willpower alone. Pyxis had been raised in that turmoil, in that heartache. She had watched her mother break and fall apart, and she had learned how love was the greater lie you could tell yourself. She had learned just how dangerous it was—how poisonous.
She had vowed that she would never make the same mistake as her mother; she would never let anyone get close enough to her to detonate in her chest. But now—with him—she wonders if it’s worth it. She wonders if she could trust him, if she could risk it. She reaches out, tentative, her breath billowing out over his jaw and she trembles now, breaking down in front of him. “I want to try, Daemron.”
Pyxis doesn’t know if she will be able to—she doesn't but she knows she can’t keep running.
She is exhausted.
She is hollowed out.
And the only thing that has ever made her alive is standing before her, offering her life.
“Will you teach me how?”
she'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair
but I still love her, I don't really care
