12-20-2015, 09:43 PM
If asked, she could never say exactly what it was about him that bewitched her like so. It could have been the vigor in the dark of his eyes (she notices how world weary they look now); the subtleties of muscle beneath the dusky tan of his skin. Maybe it was the quiet strength in him that cajoled her into submission, or the hint if gentleness that she was unused to. Whatever it was, she had never forgotten him - could never forget him as the days are long.
Loam would always stop to stare at a buckskin, to see if it was him. It never was and disappointment had become cruelly familiar to her every time she laid eyes on such beautiful tawny fur. She learned that there are ways the heart - that stupid red meat in her - could soar at the sight of something longed for than fall so sickeningly far the moment it turned out not to be… him. She knew disappointment like she knew death and dirt - intimately, an ache that rilled along her bones. Like sad fish dying onshore, her heart flopped and gulped with want for him - he could be her everything, her foodwaterair.
He smiles; it feels like the sun rising in the morning and it hurts her but she relishes the pain. Starving, selfish, she asks for more with the tenderest (which for Loam is a feat of sheer determination to not be malicious) touch of her lips to him. She doesn't tell him that she came like he asked, to visit the falls, lurking as a shadow is wont to do at the edge of the rock and wood. Loam doesn't need to tell him because it's in the past and they're here, in the present. “Yes,” she murmurs, wanting to say it over and over in a strange new chant.
“Yes,” she breathes against him, heady from the way his scent fills her nostrils - she needs the smell of him more than she needs air, her lungs are greedy and sucking. Loam, no lie in her voice as she repeats that mantra, is too selfish to ask him if that's what he wants.