11-05-2016, 12:16 PM
It is so much to ask of him, more than she even realizes – she does not understand what it is he has to lose by making such a promise. If she did, she would not have asked. But he makes the promise anyway, leaning down to press his cheek against her neck and for a moment she is breathless with the familiarity of this gesture. How many times had she seen her father do the same to her mother, press his ragged worries to her skin and breathe deep so as to find that peace again. Her heart stutters in her chest, but she is quiet when she presses her mouth against his shoulder in return, tasting that impossibly pale gold with tremulous lips.
Always. She thinks again, and she finds that word has an entirely new weight. Instinctively, uncertainly, she shrugs back from him, touching her mouth to the soft hollow at the corner of his lip so that he will know it is not him she is shying from. But she needs to see his face now, to trace the quiet dark in his eyes and the lines of faint tension where they coil beneath his skin. He is a stranger. He is distant and silent where she is loud and reflexive with her embraces. He craves solitude where she craves a world with no boundaries, no edges, no separation between the wilds and civilization. But, he is her stranger. He is hers and she can feel him like a weight in her chest, and that weight is appeased only by his promise, by that strange word, always.
“Tobiah.” She breathes, a sound like tempered birdsong, a release of pain and sorrow and longing – for many things, though mostly for a world erased. But she finds solace in the way he watches her, and so she reaches out to push his forelock aside, to find the impossibly soft whorl of gold fur beneath it and press a quiet kiss to it. “Thank you.”
It is in this moment that she knows for sure, that even despite the new weight of an old word, an average word, she wants this always. This promise, this stranger – and the notion is terrifying. It steals the air from her lungs and leaves her heart pounding in her chest until it is just an unrecognizable ache and she is sure there is only pink and ragged pulp left to mark that it ever existed at all. She thought home was gone, ruined, obliterated when the world unbecame, but suddenly here it is, just as it always would have been, and it exists within that single promise.
She feels uncharacteristically shy when she folds back against him, fitting easily beneath the curve of his neck. There is less desperation in the gesture now, less wild flashing in her eyes when they fall against his face for a single second before disappearing once more beneath the dark tangles of an unruly forelock. A sigh builds in her chest, climbing to her lips and steadying the racing of her heart when she closes her eyes and leans into him. “Where do we go, Tobiah,” a pause, breathless, an impossible half-smile pressed into his chest, “where do we start?”
Always. She thinks again, and she finds that word has an entirely new weight. Instinctively, uncertainly, she shrugs back from him, touching her mouth to the soft hollow at the corner of his lip so that he will know it is not him she is shying from. But she needs to see his face now, to trace the quiet dark in his eyes and the lines of faint tension where they coil beneath his skin. He is a stranger. He is distant and silent where she is loud and reflexive with her embraces. He craves solitude where she craves a world with no boundaries, no edges, no separation between the wilds and civilization. But, he is her stranger. He is hers and she can feel him like a weight in her chest, and that weight is appeased only by his promise, by that strange word, always.
“Tobiah.” She breathes, a sound like tempered birdsong, a release of pain and sorrow and longing – for many things, though mostly for a world erased. But she finds solace in the way he watches her, and so she reaches out to push his forelock aside, to find the impossibly soft whorl of gold fur beneath it and press a quiet kiss to it. “Thank you.”
It is in this moment that she knows for sure, that even despite the new weight of an old word, an average word, she wants this always. This promise, this stranger – and the notion is terrifying. It steals the air from her lungs and leaves her heart pounding in her chest until it is just an unrecognizable ache and she is sure there is only pink and ragged pulp left to mark that it ever existed at all. She thought home was gone, ruined, obliterated when the world unbecame, but suddenly here it is, just as it always would have been, and it exists within that single promise.
She feels uncharacteristically shy when she folds back against him, fitting easily beneath the curve of his neck. There is less desperation in the gesture now, less wild flashing in her eyes when they fall against his face for a single second before disappearing once more beneath the dark tangles of an unruly forelock. A sigh builds in her chest, climbing to her lips and steadying the racing of her heart when she closes her eyes and leans into him. “Where do we go, Tobiah,” a pause, breathless, an impossible half-smile pressed into his chest, “where do we start?”