She had hidden herself from him the moment she was sure what their dalliance meant, that this fullness in her belly was more than the result of an unordinarily lush summer. She wasn’t sure if it was denial or cowardice, or if it was just the only way she knew how to deal with the turmoil of worry building like a tempest inside her chest, but she had never sought him out, never told him that he would be a father soon.
She is sure that she had meant to, had laid quiet beneath a trillion stars each night and thought of ways to tell him, but on the rare nights she had found the resolve to go to their place beneath the storms, he had not been there waiting. Of course he hadn’t, though. The only way in which she belonged to him was through the bonds of their home, through the Pampas themselves. This feeling inside her chest had been wholly one sided, this thing that was more than affection, more than curiosity, but not even half enough to be anything like love. She had allowed herself to be misled by her own naivety, by the thrill of a beautiful stranger who did not want her to face death alone, by his willingness to face her demons with her.
By their sameness and their differences.
By the pull of his gravity.
He felt like home, he felt like storms, he felt like a piece of her heart that she would never choose to surrender - even in his distant impermanence.
And she had meant to tell him about the life growing inside her belly, because a child is not something you hide from their father, just as fatherhood is not a choice she would ever rob Obscene of. But when pain finds her in the night she knows she waited too long to tell him, to find him, to give him this choice before he ever had to look into the face of his child and decide what it was he wanted.
(And it feels like a wonder now that she had ever doubted him at all, as she remembers his story of a boy left to fend for himself, a wild and feral thing without parents who loved him well enough. She knows, realizes, that their child would never know that kind of loneliness, that whether Obscene had expected this or not, he would adapt.)
There is only one place that she can think to check, only one place close enough for her to reach amidst growing contractions and this tempest raging beneath her skin. It is their place above the Pampas and beneath the indigo-black sky, their place where storms come in to kiss their faces and leave tangles in their hair. Their place in the inbetween. “Obscene?” She asks, and pain is a beast that mutes her voice to something soft, too harsh though to be a whisper. There is sweat on her neck and her shoulders, in the hollow of her trembling flank as another contraction stills her with a groan she muffles against the curve of her own dark chest. “Are you here?” She lifts her eyes to the dark to find him but it is a starless, empty kind of night.
She is sure that she had meant to, had laid quiet beneath a trillion stars each night and thought of ways to tell him, but on the rare nights she had found the resolve to go to their place beneath the storms, he had not been there waiting. Of course he hadn’t, though. The only way in which she belonged to him was through the bonds of their home, through the Pampas themselves. This feeling inside her chest had been wholly one sided, this thing that was more than affection, more than curiosity, but not even half enough to be anything like love. She had allowed herself to be misled by her own naivety, by the thrill of a beautiful stranger who did not want her to face death alone, by his willingness to face her demons with her.
By their sameness and their differences.
By the pull of his gravity.
He felt like home, he felt like storms, he felt like a piece of her heart that she would never choose to surrender - even in his distant impermanence.
And she had meant to tell him about the life growing inside her belly, because a child is not something you hide from their father, just as fatherhood is not a choice she would ever rob Obscene of. But when pain finds her in the night she knows she waited too long to tell him, to find him, to give him this choice before he ever had to look into the face of his child and decide what it was he wanted.
(And it feels like a wonder now that she had ever doubted him at all, as she remembers his story of a boy left to fend for himself, a wild and feral thing without parents who loved him well enough. She knows, realizes, that their child would never know that kind of loneliness, that whether Obscene had expected this or not, he would adapt.)
There is only one place that she can think to check, only one place close enough for her to reach amidst growing contractions and this tempest raging beneath her skin. It is their place above the Pampas and beneath the indigo-black sky, their place where storms come in to kiss their faces and leave tangles in their hair. Their place in the inbetween. “Obscene?” She asks, and pain is a beast that mutes her voice to something soft, too harsh though to be a whisper. There is sweat on her neck and her shoulders, in the hollow of her trembling flank as another contraction stills her with a groan she muffles against the curve of her own dark chest. “Are you here?” She lifts her eyes to the dark to find him but it is a starless, empty kind of night.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain,
like losing my balance again and again