hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
The sun rises further in the sky, peeling itself from the pink horizon to hang like a ball of watery yellow silk amongst the wind-scrubbed blue. When the sunlight falls around them, catching and reflecting in the vast and pocked wall of gleaming ice, dimples of pink and gold and orange leap like flames across the snow and suddenly she is drenched in dawn. Nothing has ever been so beautiful as this. It dances across the brown dapples of her delicate skin and in the dark tangles of a very windswept mane, and when she turns to Offspring with dark eyes glowing in delight, she finds the colors dancing across the handsome black of his skin, too.
He moves close to join her again at the gate and she can feel that same, strange heat flaring in the pit of her belly even as her heart pounds wildly in her narrow chest. She loves this closeness, has come to crave the way his lips press heat beneath her skin and coax tremulous shivers along the length of her delicate spine. Her lips are still against the crisp white markings on his cheek when he starts to answer her and she finds she loves the way his low, rumbling voice vibrates his skin beneath her mouth. “Magic.” She repeats with a kind of quiet curiosity, her dark eyes disappearing thoughtfully behind lashes as black as soot. “Is it the same magic that built and maintains this ice wall?”
And then-
“Not afterwards.” She repeats stiffly, and she does not miss the implication that it had hurt at one point. She is startled to feel the way her mouth tightens and her brow furrows, the way her dark eyes narrow with something that must be anger that Offspring would ever have to feel pain. She feels it in her stomach too, a strange, defensive worry that is only appeased when she reaches over to rub her face unhappily against the curve of his dark shoulder. It was protectiveness, she realized suddenly, that tightness in her chest, in her heart, in the way she pressed closer still, to his side as if she meant to leave room for nothing else but herself. Her face was still pressed stubbornly to the hard line of his shoulder when she found her voice again and quietly, “but not now?” She just wanted to hear him say it again, to confirm that he was okay so that maybe this awful tightness in her belly would dissipate.
But his lips climb across her neck and down her cheek, along the thin line of her jaw and it is impossible for her to focus on a single detail but the ones that reveal themselves to her in the weight of the kisses he buries beneath her skin. “Then I will spend every evening loving you.” She says without ceremony, not recognizing the weight of that one single word as it slipped honestly over her dark, velvet lips. “I feel like I could spend a thousand days with you and still it wouldn’t be enough.” His neck settles back over her withers and she finds that it is a weight she has come to welcome. It is reflexive when she settles against him, her lips tracing the sensitive pink scars etched like strands of memory over his dark skin.
But then she is tense against him, her breath catching like a stutter of whispered sound in her throat. King, he says, and she can feel herself unraveling. She tried to relax against him again, to let her body soften where it was pressed to his so that he wouldn’t notice her uncertainty. It changed none of what she felt for him, not the desire to love him for everyday of a forever that suddenly felt too short, not the reflexive urge to protect him from whatever demons she could. But like a hand reaching into her chest, it dredged up those feelings of inadequacy, all those insecurities and worries she felt like a tickle in the back of her mind but tried to desperately to ignore.
You aren’t enough, the voice whispered again, the one that waited for her in the deepest shadows.
But she said none of this to him, tried to hide any trace of it from the wide-eyed way she watched him. “Of course you are.” Is all she can say, and in a voice so soft that the wind might’ve stolen some words. She remembers crashing against him in the meadow like a frightened doe, the way he had quieted her frantic heart and made her feel almost immediately safe. “You’re a natural leader.” A caretaker, she thinks, a friend. Her nose touches his cheek but the gesture is more subdued than usual and she pulls away again without leaving a kiss.
There is a creeping hollowness in her chest as doubt burns like a fever inside her.
Isle
