He takes a step back when she walks toward him, more instinctual than anything. The recoiling of fingers away from the flame—the desperate need to keep your flesh from splitting along the knife’s edge. She is the sun and she is beautiful, but in this moment she is deadly. In this moment, he cannot stare into her lest he go blind and so he takes that jerky step back, feeling his heart stuttering dangerously in his chest.
She says his name and he winces because he still loves the way that she says it.
Still love the way it sounds when she presses her lips into each syllable.
“Not anymore,” he says, because he can’t be everything if he is only a part. He is a fraction of her life, he thinks, and then bitterly wonders if he is even that. It is no wonder. He should have tried harder to come back from death, he thinks, and then this wouldn’t have happened. He should have fought harder against death when it first came knowing on his door and maybe this would never have happened at all.
She blames herself though—of course—and this is enough to stir him from the depths of his sorrow. Enough to pull him up out of the muck. He meets her eyes. Forces himself to hold her gaze and then drown himself in it. “I have always loved you, Agetta.” His voice is thick, his eyes brimming with his sorrow. “Every inch of you. Every shadow. Every thing that you would have kept hidden.”
He shakes his head.
“I wish you could have trusted that. Trusted me.”
For a moment, there is a pause and then a moment longer. It stretches long and thin between them—drawing out until he could choke on the tension, until all of the things unsaid between them bubble up.
“Are you not afraid to show him all of you?”
He is not sure he wants to know.
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to