so we let our shadows fall away like dust
Maybe it is best that he doesn’t ask why she had not used her magic against him like a shield or a blade that first night they came together, why she had not pushed him back and away as she could have. She wouldn’t have had an answer for him, didn’t know why even after he buried his teeth in her neck she still couldn’t bring herself to retaliate. Not against him. Instead she had asked him to stay, had wanted him to stay even as he turned and disappeared into the shadow of the night.
He reaches back when she reaches for him, closing the distance between them by half and letting her fall against his chest without protest. She is glad for this. Glad for the easy, quiet acceptance, glad for the closeness she would use to hold herself together when it seemed like all her heart wanted to do was fall apart. Her mouth finds his neck, her tongue finds his wounds – and though she is gentle with her movements, so careful when she sweeps the deep red crust from the wounds, she still thinks she feels him shudder against her.
She pauses, uncertain, worried that she’s hurt him somehow until she feels his face pressed to her mane and a low moan buried in her neck. The smiles that comes to her mouth is soft and half-empty, not quite reaching the flash of those dark, earthy eyes when they close as she leans against him. It fades completely when he shifts out of her reach, when he denies her as Stillwater had, moving so she cannot reach his wounds.
She is so tired of being pushed away.
Her dark eyes flash with that hurt when she glances up at him, quieted and made distant by the way he limits her. But he doesn’t pull away completely, stays close enough to press her to his chest and so she softens again, confused, and huddles beneath his neck. His mouth finds her back as she settles closer again, drags along skin that prickles and tightens at the contact, at the heat of his breath. So she turns to touch his face again, with gentle lips and almost kisses, coaxing the softness from him she knew existed beneath the dark.
Luster, he says and his gentleness coaxes some of the fire back, some of the dark that had settled in her heart amidst the deep and jagged fissures. Her mouth settles against the spot of blue beside his, warm and needing and hollow all at once, asking for more than she should, more than she can give. But it eases the agony in her chest somehow, makes the pain of not being enough, of not being wanted something that she can almost, almost bear.
Almost.
He inhales sharply and she smiles again, something sad and dark and beautiful all at once, leaning into the closeness when he drops his head to lay it against hers. He laughs so softly at her question, brushes a kiss across the top of her nose and she closes her eyes and pushes into it. “Please.” She says, equally soft, dropping her nose to his jaw which she traces with gentle teeth. This she would wield against him, for him, his name on her lips, in every echo of their beating hearts. “Tell me.” She says again in response to his desperate groan, those starlight eyes dangerously dark now.
He promises to stay, at least, invites her to come with him, even. But he smiles, amused, places a kiss at the corner of her mouth and she realizes she cannot tell if he means it or not. If he understands how fragile the heart is that he is coaxing from her chest with his closeness and his kisses and the gentle way he keeps her. So she says nothing back to him, leans instead against these newer kisses with a heaviness in her chest that felt like it might crush her.
When he pulls back to look at her with so much warmth in those eyes, all the gentleness she knew he possessed despite the way he seemed to hide it, she can only soften and kiss him again – something more honest, something sweeter and untouched by the jagged brokenness in her chest. I can’t give you my name, he says, still soft though she can see the deeper currents of something more in the smile that pulls at the corner of his lips. Her skin prickles knowingly, and a strange heat – a blush, perhaps – uncoils from someplace deep in her belly to settle beneath the murky blue of her skin.
His mouth drops beside her ear, greets it with a quiet kiss, I won’t be able to stop until you’re moaning it. She inhales sharply, surprised and not, pulling back but not away so that her eyes can more easily search his face. Her world is turmoil all at once, her heart seething and furious and reaching for this bone-dark man to heal it. To love her as Stillwater could not, even if only in this physical, shallow way.
But –
He isn’t Stillwater. Isn’t the man she had called on her stars for. Isn’t the man she had curled with in the dark of a quiet cave, the man she had given herself to. I’m yours. She had said, had promised him at the lake more than once. That promise still mattered.
She drops her face from him, defeated, pushes closer to a chest that she should be seeking distance from and folds against it like the lifeline he’s become. There is no space between them, she eliminates that with the soft curves of her blue body, only skin pressed to skin and bone, a warm mouth returned to nurse at the wounds around his bone plates. When she does speak, finally, it is without that dangerous heat, without the blush burning beneath her skin. But maybe this is somehow worse, somehow more treacherous because the words that spill from her lips and against his broken skin are the honest, ruinous kind. “You should have stayed that night,” a quiet pause, a heavy pause, another kiss pressed to his dark shoulder, “you should have found me first.”
