That night will eat her alive.
The night that was full of pretending. The night that she left her eyes shut tight against the tops of her cheeks, and pretended not to feel her slip away into the night. But how could she have missed it? How could she have ignored two hearts becoming one, or the absence of heat that she left in her wake? That night will eat her alive, because she had noticed, tight-lipped, with sweat that she could feel bead down the back of her neck. That night will eat her alive because she watched her leave if only because she could not bear to see her eyes that morning.
And she should feel relief.
It should flood through her flesh and break through her bones like rivers through dams. It should drown the guilt. It should empty her cells of anything but water. Here she is, the love of all loves, and she has nothing but kindness in her heart when she kisses her forehead and says: ‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’
But everything is wrong.
Every moment is wrong without the only child she has ever brought herself to love, and it’s a wrongness she never thought could devour the magnitude of Cordis.
“I think this will consume us,” she says, because she can already feel the acid of some ancient creature’s gut biting at her skin. She feels like she is dissolving. She feels like she is watching Cordis dissolve, too, as though her skin is sloughing off before her eyes, and she knows that this is precisely what He has always intended.
“We should have run like the wild things,” she says then, because it would have been easier than what is to come. And what is to come? A pair of downcast eyes, too ashamed to look her lover in her own. She will not. She cannot. It will kill her to look into the fractures of her irises and tell her: “He could let her go if we had something to offer him.”
Because Cordis will know what she is asking.
Because Cordis will know that her lover has forsaken her for the love of something else. Reality will burn through her bones, and her flesh, through the brand hot on her hip – because Cordis will know that she is asking her to trade a life for a life.
That night will eat her alive, but so will this one.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know