DESPOINA
She doesn’t speak as he tells her the story—doesn’t dare interrupt or even make a sound as he unfurls everything that lives within his heart to tell her what had happened. There are pieces of her that break in the retelling. Vital pieces of her that crumble to dust as he expounds on what it had been like to live and then die, what it had been like to hear such horrible things told to him, even if it was from phantom lips.
It is so similar to what she has experienced, that hurt hurled her way, and every angry word she has spoken to him rings in her ears. It echoes in the empty hollows of her chest and she feels a deep sense of shame spear through her. A weight along her shoulders for ever adding onto the sorrows of his life. For being one more person to lash out at him and say the worst of him—except hers were no phantom lips.
But she doesn’t dredge up such self-pity or self-loathing.
She just watches him.
When he confesses that he needs negative emotions to survive, she finally breaks that silence with a sharp inhale, her darkened eyes widening in surprise. And all of a sudden, it all makes so much sense. Everything clicks into place and something like peace, as broken and treacherous as it is, settles in her, soothes her twisted heart. She doesn’t hesitate to close the distance between them, folding herself amongst the shadows of him—and later she might wonder at the bravery, the brashness of such an action.
But for now, it just feels right. She forgets her anger and her hurt. She just focuses instead on the feeling of him being near her, that intoxicating sensation of being surrounded by the spice of him. Quietly, she presses iridescent lips to the slope of his shoulder and then his chest where she knows his heart still beat.
“You won’t starve,” she promises, her voice steady and cool. Determined. Because she has never had anything to even pretend to call her own—and she won’t lose him, regardless of what he has said. What he has done. “And I won’t be hurt so long as I know what is happening.” This is a lie, she thinks, because the idea of him touching or being near another still twists her stomach. “We’ll find where you can feed.”
She glances up, steel in her eye, “I can help.”
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do