04-25-2015, 08:39 PM
‘Cordis doesn’t think so,’ he says, as though he knows – as though he had been the one that compared her to mermaids when she bathed in the river under moonlight, as though he had stood against the hazel brush himself, as though he’d given her the only children she could ever bring herself to love. Over and over, he says her name, tastes it on his tongue like wine; sweet and warm.
It isn’t his to drink.
She isn’t his to taste.
‘If Cordis had been mine,’ he says, and here the skin will twinge and prickle across her spine; her ears fall flat against her skull, but she’s still listening. Even as the blood in her veins begins to bubble, she’s still listening. She knows the words before he says them. The words of men. The words that could only belong to men, who took what they wanted and gave nothing back.
Mine.
‘I would never have let go,’ he says, and he smiles a smile that is supposed to make her knees weak and her heart hurt – but it doesn’t. Once she was a wild thing. Once she was a mouse. Once she hid a jitterbug heart behind her ribs, but she does not now. She is none of those things anymore. She is not a coward when she says: “Because you think like that is precisely the reason that you will never have her.”
“Must men try to conquer everything?”
It isn’t his to drink.
She isn’t his to taste.
‘If Cordis had been mine,’ he says, and here the skin will twinge and prickle across her spine; her ears fall flat against her skull, but she’s still listening. Even as the blood in her veins begins to bubble, she’s still listening. She knows the words before he says them. The words of men. The words that could only belong to men, who took what they wanted and gave nothing back.
Mine.
‘I would never have let go,’ he says, and he smiles a smile that is supposed to make her knees weak and her heart hurt – but it doesn’t. Once she was a wild thing. Once she was a mouse. Once she hid a jitterbug heart behind her ribs, but she does not now. She is none of those things anymore. She is not a coward when she says: “Because you think like that is precisely the reason that you will never have her.”
“Must men try to conquer everything?”