don't ruin this for me
She does not echo his name the way he had echoed hers (and it had, in fact, sounded like a song but then it always sounded like some sweet melody to her). She keeps it caged in her chest instead, lets it beat against her ribs. She can feel it, too, as it seeps into her bloodstream. Is it it the poison or the antidote? She is too distracted by the sound of his voice to recognize it as either.
And she watches, intrigued, as he moves into the depths. Away from her. She is alone again on the shore, but she feels no pang of desperate loneliness. There is no panic when he speaks and it sounds like goodbye. If she needs him, she will find him here. (She has to wonder what it means to need someone. She has needed her mother, certainly. And father and sister to some degree. But she does not know what it means to need someone who does not share your blood.)
How sweetly her breath leaves her as his edges go soft. As all that vibrant color leaches into the water and is carried away on the current. And he looks back at her, but he is something she has never seen before. He is born of the water, certainly, perhaps even more than her father, and she cannot help her wonder.
And how desperately she wants to touch him, her want so potent that it drives her into the water, too. But she cannot reach him in time. He is solid again by the time she reaches for him. Though her glass mouth comes away wet, he wears the evidence on his skin.
“You believe in fate?” she asks him without lifting her mouth from his neck, murmurs it directly into his skin. “I think you are mine.” Such a simple girl she is, fashioned around the dream at the center of her. The galaxies beneath her skin spin around that fever dream. Her heart pulses around it. Foolish, too. Naive. She does not realize the danger of saying such things, not when she believes them.
