it's just a little white lie, adna

[bethlehem]

I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.

He wonders if he’ll ever get used to it.
How willing she is to meld into him.
How she curls her body to fit it perfectly against him.
And even with the time that has passed and the weight she has lost, she still fits against him as if she were made specifically for that purpose.

Perhaps he had been a fool to so willfully ignore this. He remembers, though, how she’d said that she thought she was meant to find him and he’d responded in the only way he’d known how, by turning it into a joke. Because he hadn’t known how to believe it. Not until now.

They were made for each other and he could not ignore it any longer. Despite the way that they sometimes mixed like oil and water, refusing to bend to each other’s wills. Despite the way they fought, trying desperately to get to the root of each other’s hurt, to plunge a blade into the still-beating heart. He’s never believed much in destiny, but she tells him that she loves him in return and he thinks this is the closest he’ll ever get.

She kisses him and there is a glimmer of a smile in the furthest corners of his mouth as he lifts his head to lay his cheek to rest along the ladder of her spine. He is content, for the moment, to simply siphon the heat from her.

“Now we’ve just got to learn how to do it the right way,” he mutters and then exhales a breath of laughter.

BETHLEHEM

I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.

[adna]

I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher

She will never grow tired of this, she thinks, with her cheek against his shoulder, her lips moving to his chest. To the way that she can feel his pulse beneath her mouth and the way that it feels like home. She can barely remember a time before she knew the feel of it so intimately. Before the pulse of it was the background to all of her dreams. Before she set the rhythm of her day to it, learning how to breathe in time with him, keep pace with the very fabric of his being and then frame her life around it.

He holds her close and she thinks that she has never wanted more than this.

Could never want anything other than this.

She just smiles as she closes her eyes and relishes the feeling of him around her—the weight of his skull against her spine and the heat of his body against the cool scales of her own. That vibrant feel of life.

“I don’t think you and I will ever learn the right way to do anything,” she laughs, her voice light enough that it could not be mistaken for anything but a joke—anything but the humor that she laces it with. “But we will learn how to do it our way, and I think that matters for as much as anything.” She presses a kiss to him again, letting her mouth linger on the warmth of his hide, that miraculous feel of him there with her.

“I am sorry that we keep taking so long to find one another.”

This, whispered quieter into him.

“But I am home now.”

in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire

Adna

[bethlehem]

I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.

He knows that she’s right.
Were he a romantic he might have thought it some kind of magic.
That the two of them had found each other and, instead of subscribing to the natural order of things, forged their own way, simply made it up as they went along.
But he is a simple man who understands that that specific kind of magic does not exist in the world. Love is not a song or a poem or any other number of romantic things.

He understands now that love is hard but it is worth it in the quiet moments like these. When she presses her mouth against his skin and fills him with heat. When he lays his head to rest along the length of her rocky spine and feels her move beneath it. When they breathe in tandem, long and slow and even. When she is not threatening to rip his throat out or leave. When he is not being willfully ignorant or obtuse.

He laughs, buoyed by the light in her. “It’s going to be hard,” he warns, though he knows she is just as acutely aware of this as he is. He draws back then, kisses her forehead. “But I wouldn’t want to figure it out with anyone else.”

BETHLEHEM

I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.