I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Adaline’s heart is a wicked, wicked thing.
It is selfish and all-consuming and demanding. It wants things it has no right in wanting. It wants things to be kept all to itself, wants to hoard them, clawing at their chest until she can taste their love on her tongue. She wants to bathe in it. She wants to be reminded of it. She wants to curl into the warmth of it and never leave. She wants Contagion’s heart in the way that she wants light and air. She needs it, she thinks.
But, then, Adaline does not consider herself tethered. She is flighty and enamored with the idea of love, an idea of love she had learned from a butterfly-mother who crawled from the ocean to claim her lover and pull him back under with her. It was a warped view of love: a one-sided view. It was a love that would fill all of the holes in her life without demanding too much. It was a love she could feast on unhindered.
She was a glutton for it.
Not that she thinks of it now, curled into his side, lips playing along his shoulder and occasionally pulling at his mane. She does not think of everyone else she may love or come to love—everyone else that she may claim as her own, pulling at their heart because it was the only way she knew. Instead she thinks of the way he smells of seagulls and salt and home. She thinks of the way her body hums when she is next to him and the pleasure that causes her eyes to go heavy, her smile dreamy and soft and far away.
She tilts her head back to look at him through her gauzy lashes, studying him, memorizing the lines of his face. “I belong here—with you.” She lipped at his jaw, a shiver running down the length of her spine and then spreading outward. “I don’t care where we go. I will follow you anywhere.” And she believes it. She truly does.
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator