"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
He has never considered himself a proud man.
Bethlehem, in all the years he’s lived, has never had anything worth being proud of.
So, it doesn’t take swallowing his pride. It doesn’t take grinning and bearing the bitter taste of resignation. There is nothing to swallow except his breath as she turns to face him again.
Unsurprisingly, he does not have an answer for her now either. Why? Why should she stay when he has given her no reason to think his company worthwhile? Why should she stay when he has done nothing but shirk her attempts at finding some common ground?
He drags in a shuddering breath and he thinks about the crippling loneliness that sometimes plagues him. A side effect, no doubt, of choosing to live his life alone. He thinks about the anger and the vitriol and the grief she had laid bare for him. He thinks about the way her teeth had skirted along the vulnerable plains of the jugular just beneath the surface of his skin and how, in that moment, he had hoped so fiercely that she’d make good on her threat that it had almost taken him to his knees. How viciously he had wanted her to extinguish the dark flame at the center of him.
Her expression shifts around the edges of something he doesn’t know how to identify as she takes a step back into his orbit. She stops short then, armed with another iteration of her question and he answers by closing up the distance that remains between them. He answers by skirting his teeth along the curve of her shoulder, dragging his mouth across the landscape of her scaled skin to bring it to rest against her spine again.
“I’d like it if you stayed,” he murmurs then, his voice catching thick in his throat. It’s not an answer, really, but it’s the most he can offer.
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
She doesn’t know how to discern him.
She has spent her life surrounded by men she cannot understand. She never understood her father and the way that he so purposefully tore his life apart again and again (although she is starting to think that she can understand it better now). She never understood Ophanim and the way his kind heart would just grow two sizes for every injustice performed against him. She never understood them—never understood.
But he is something else entirely.
He is infuriating in his ability to slip from her mental grasp and the more that she tries to pick him apart, the more he comes undone. She thought that she could get a rise out of him, but she couldn’t. She thought that she could just leave him alone, but he didn’t tell her to leave like she thought that he would.
But she doesn’t get to contemplate it for as long as she thought she would.
Because he’s back against her and his mouth is hot on her shoulder and she suddenly doesn’t care. “Okay,” she says, but it’s not the words that matter as much as the fact that she drops her head to press a fanged kiss by his side. “I’ll stay, Bethlehem.” She isn’t sure why she likes saying his name except that every time she does, it feels like another anchor in his reality—another way to remind herself he is real.
She frowns as her chest comes to rest against his, her scales meeting his flesh and bone.
She snips lightly at his dark belly and then stretches out to rest her cheek along his back.
“I’ll stay,” she promises, and she wonders how long he will let her.
the only way to being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
Finally, that great, dark thing stirs in his chest.
The rise she has been trying to bait out of him swells like bile in the column of his throat.
His anger is barbed as it wraps its white-knuckled fist his lungs.
He struggles to breathe around it as it grows roots around his ribcage.
He is not angry at her. No, he is angry at the vibrant marble of a thing that glows at the center of him, radiates heat he can feel in the marrow of his bones. He has known the company of so many women that the memories of each of them have become a blur – one singular memory of violent frenzy – so he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the thing sunk like a stone in the pit of his gut is not lust. It is something else entirely. And this is what stokes the smoldering flames of his anger.
His muscles quiver with it as she lays her head heavy along the ridge of his spine. If he is still enough, he thinks that he can feel the beat of her heart through her chest with how fiercely it is pressed against his. Or perhaps it is the pulse of his anger as he rails against this marble that festers and sets him ablaze. Because there is such an enormous comfort in the heat and weight of her that everything in him fights it, tooth and nail, spitting mad.
The expression does not change. The only indication of the rogue wave that lays him to waste is the way the muscles tremble, the way he grits his teeth so fiercely that the muscle in his jaw pulses, the way he sinks his teeth into the soft flesh of her hip.
How long will he let her stay? How long will he keep her?
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
Does he know the storms that rage through her?
She is so desperate for contact of any kind and yet his is somehow the worst of all. She isn’t sure that she will survive this—this feeling of him pressed to her, that earth-shaking feeling of him letting her so near. It is intoxicating and poisonous in the same breath, and she wonders at how she’s managed to hold on this long at all. He has said again and again in their time together how worthless he is; he has said that he has nothing to tell her, nothing to share, and yet she finds entire worlds trapped between them.
She finds that the galaxies spit her out when her heart thunders and races against his own.
How does he hide all of this beneath the surface, she wonders. How does he continue pretending that he is just a normal wandered with a heart for silence and keeping to himself. How does he hide what she now finds barely beneath the surface—the way that the muscles on his back rope and tighten, the way that his teeth sinks into her hip, the way that his flesh is suddenly on fire and she—she too is set aflame.
“Beth…” it is the first time that she’s shortened his name and it is mostly by accident, it is mostly because her throat closes around it and she finds that she can’t finish the rest of it. She doesn’t know how to keep breathing when she is trembling in his grasp, when she is coming undone beneath his palm.
She swallows hard and lets her mouth wander along his back. She traces the constellations on it and tries to find the strength to hold herself together. She tries to remember that she can survive this—survive him.
“I think I was meant to find you,” she whispers, low enough that maybe he won’t hear it. Maybe it will just be a confession she can make into the dip and curve of him and walk away with it as a secret still.
The rest of the words die on her tongue and she focuses on the firestorm he sets off in her veins.
the only way to being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
How have they arrived here?
It is only a matter of moments but he can already feel her in the marrow of his bones.
In the holy architecture of his lungs.
In the space between each pulse of his bastard heart.
Will he still feel her when she’s gone? Will he spend the rest of his life chasing this feeling in the same way, as a child, he had chased love? The anger spits and spirals in the pit of his gut and his nostrils flare with it. He struggles to maintain his composure, to remain impassive, to touch her as if it means nothing at all to him.
But it does mean something and he loathes it. Because it finds that it hurts when his heart comes back to life. As it shakes off the rust and the ruin and reminds him that it is there and that it has always been there. It twinges and it hitches his breath and she speaks his name so familiarly that it makes his head swim. But he can blame the dizziness on his inability to breathe.
The flesh trembles in the wake of her hot, wandering mouth. His spine aches with it. The space in his chest occupied by his heart aches with it. It tightens a vise around the column of his throat and he wishes again that she’d killed him when she’d had the chance. Because the anger festers so fiercely he can taste it on the surface of his skin. But he is not cruel, Bethlehem, and he does not shrug her off. He kisses her instead. Kisses the jut of her shoulder and the crook of her elbow and the peak of her hipbone.
“What took you so long?” he asks then. It should be injected with humor, but it comes out breathless instead.
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
Her mouth is dry and her head is swimming. She can’t think around him—can’t comprehend anything but the way that suddenly he has taken on something new entirely within her. He is not the stranger that she ran into while trying to outrun her demons. He is not the apathetic vagabond with nothing but more questions and nothing of himself to give. He is none of those things because he is suddenly Beth.
He is her Beth and he is trembling with the same things that she herself trembles with.
Hers.
It is a possessive flare of her greedy heart that carries her against him, that leaves her exploring him, so content to spend her time finding the scars on his coat, the dips of his ribs. If she curls her neck just right, her mouth can wander down his muddied leg, pressing kisses along the ridges of it.
His question leaves her breathless and she has to pause to right herself, to keep from crashing. She has to remind herself that this is real—that the man who holds her now, who presses feverish kisses against her is real. “I don’t know,” she says, honestly, her throat tight. “I don’t know.”
She wants to laugh and ask if it matters.
Did it matter that it took so long for her to find him?
Does anything matter because she did—she did.
“Don’t disappear,” she whispers into him, still just as quiet, as quiet as she can manage because this, too, is too much for her to look at straight. Her fear is like the sun and even though he is the most real thing that she has ever felt, she cannot shake the terror that races up her spine that she will open her eyes—
and he will be gone.
the only way to being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
How fiercely he wants to recoil.
How viciously he aches to skirt just out of the reach of the heat of her mouth.
He does not deserve to be touched by her.
Worthless bastard that he is. Useless, ordinary, plain.
Not fit for the adoration of a woman born from royalty, certainly.
But she kisses him and he is rendered powerless. He cannot force his limbs to comply with his mind’s demands, he cannot force them to carry him away from her. He cannot breathe around the anger and the want and the heat that coils wickedly at the center of him. Every inch of him is doused in flame and he wants to extinguish it just as much as he wants to stoke it. He wants her to watch him burn and he wants to take her with him.
For the moment, they do not belong to the world at large. They do not belong to the earth or the moon or the stars. They belong only to each other. His chest heaves and he swallows thickly, scrambling for purchase where there is none. There is nothing to hold onto. He cannot catch his footing. He cannot rear back his head or cast himself out of her orbit. He is powerless to do anything but continue to drag his mouth along the peaks and valleys of her body.
Her request is nearly lost to the tremors of his skin. Don’t disappear, she whispers. He has never been in the business of making promises that he knows he cannot keep. But there is a heart stirring in the cavern of his chest for the first time in so many years and his head is swimming as he moves behind her, into her, as he mutters into the tangles of her mane, “I won’t.” And he sighs, says it again. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t,” like a mantra.
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
At the core of her, Adna is a naive, inexperienced thing.
She has felt loss, and she has known pain, but when it comes to matters of the heart, she has felt very little. She has shared her bed with only one other man and it was one of her childhood best friends. It was a boy who had known her and seen her cry. It was a boy she knew could never be hers.
This is so different and she feels drunk on it—out of her depth, underwater.
Each touch from him sends her spinning. He is a whiskey on her tongue and she is so foolish—so silly—to think that she could handle it. She is so foolish to think that she could match him. Because regardless of what he says, he is not plain—not ordinary. He is entire constellations and forest fires and she wishes that she could be eloquent enough to tell him all of the ways that she finds him beautiful.
But her mind is a fog of need now and she can only shiver when he touches her, can only reach out blindly to touch him. When he circles her, she leans back into him and then accepts him. His weight is like something holy on her back and she feels his mouth against her neck and the wild tangles of mane.
I won’t, he says, and she finds something like relief there, but the relief is so quickly washed away by the tension that grows in her belly. The fear of losing him slips away for now—I won’t, he said—but it is replaced by a growing need. She grows lightheaded and dizzy; she feels like she might come apart.
“Beth,” is the only thing that she can remember—the only word that comes to her lips. So she just says it like a prayer. She repeats it, softly at first and then more assuredly. She learns the syllables of it so that they become the only thing that she can cling to, the only language she knows being the feel of his hips.
There is a shudder, a violent tremor, and then stillness.
“Beth,” a question and answer in one.
the only way to being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other?
B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago
He is driven by the sound of his name.
That glowing marble of a thing at the very center of him.
Every inch of him that is set ablaze.
He is driven by some great need he has never known before. Because it is more than just violent need. The anger has dissolved around the barbed edges of his want. His want to devour her. His want to fold her into the space between his ribs. His want to leave himself in her. So he breathes her in and he breathes himself out, hopes that he catches in the tangles of her mane, hopes that he seeps through the scaled skin to live in the network of her veins.
He wants her to remember him when he inevitably leaves. Despite the way he gasps it into her neck, I won’t, I won’t I won’t. He wants her to believe it and maybe there is some part of him that wants to believe it, too. He has no way of knowing that the weight of her in his bones will not be enough to finally stay him, but he has no reason to believe that it will.
For the moment, though, he merely loses himself in her. Until he is slick with sweat and his knees are trembling and his feet find the earth again and he brings his weary head to rest on her hip. He struggles to catch his breath then, the muscles quivering with the residue of his vibrant anger and the exertion and the ecstasy that had torn through him. His eyes fall heavy closed and he exhales a shuddering sigh.
When he finally lifts his head it is to press a chaste kiss against the soft spot where he had laid his head. He is not much of a romantic, never has been, he has no great line to feed her. So, instead, he presses his forehead into the smooth plains of her shoulder and sighs, “Adna.”
I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words
He doesn’t need to do, or say, anything more. She is already irreversibly and irrevocably his. He has been branded on her and the tides of her pulse have been altered to flow around the new paths of his presence. She knows, in some secret part of her heart, that he will leave. That she won’t be enough to keep him here—even though she wants to be. She is ashamed for how much she wants to be enough.
When the weight finally lifts from her back, she is trembling from exhaustion and desire, and she feels her scales slip against his slickened flesh. She feels him press a kiss to her hip and then come up her side and she curls around to find his chest, to press her cheek there so that she can hear his heart pounding.
Does it beat the same as hers?
Does it have the same tempo?
She swallows hard and wonders at the golden glow in her chest that is only mirrored by the darkness of dread that is already snaking through her—this reminder that this is temporary. She grasps at the shadows of him already; she clutches it to her and wishes against hope that it will not fall through her fingers.
He says her name and she can’t stop the single tear that hits her cheek.
“Beth,” she whispers against his heart—his wild, beautiful, tangled heart. “Don’t leave,” she hates herself for how weak she sounds and she bites her lips until they bleed, until the fangs split them open.
“Just a little longer, okay?”
But it doesn’t matter because she knows that he is like smoke and even knowing that, that her heart has been twisted like barbed wire around the memory of him. She swallows hard and then says nothing else, just standing there in the cool autumn air with his pulse to her ear, waiting for the hammer to fall.
He is next to her and she misses him already.
the only way to being found is getting lost at first but all I find are more bridges to burn
