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Tobiah had never promised anyone anything. It’s not that he did not trust his word, only that he did not think he had a right to offer it. His word was built on the foundation of an utterly selfish life, one that had been carried out in secret and in the dark places of the world. He had kept to himself, watching the Tundra revolve around him, affecting him but never shaping him. He had watched on as a silent observer, never touching it or letting it touch him. Not until he had met her and the axis of the world had shifted.
Not until he met here and suddenly everything he had thought was enough was hollow, shallow, weak.
She was a the honey-gold drop of sunlight—beautiful and vibrant and he felt selfish for even dreaming that he could hold it. She deserved a life that was lived to the fullest and he could barely force himself out here where others surrounded them. What could he possibly offer her? She would tire eventually of being loved in the shadows but the hermit stallion who could not stand the raised voices and heat of a crowd.
She deserved better. She deserved better.
Still, he could not stop himself from aching with want, for stretching his fingers toward the sun, even when he felt his flesh sizzle. “Always,” he repeated and it felt like blasphemy on his tongue, a promise that he desperately wanted to make even when he wasn’t sure that he could, that he should. She looks at him again and he feels himself come undone, feels the knots in his chest loosen even as the fear tightened its grip on his throat. He knew the prices that were to be made for feeling this way; more than anyone.
What he could lose. What he could never gain back.
“I will stay,” he finally says because he cannot say what else lingers in his heart—not yet. He cannot allow himself to feel it, to admit to it, to cave to its strength like an oak before the storm. But still, he leans, slightly, downward to place his check against her neck and breathe in deep. If he was to die a sinner then he would revel in the sin for whatever moments he had left.
He would be a thief in the night to steal but a moment with her.
He would deal with the consequences later.
tobiah