12-27-2017, 02:18 AM
He had not thought much about that day.
In part because it was too difficult.
It was a challenge to push her away – it was too painful to spurn her, when she yearned for such little, yet gave so much. He would rather have her believe that her soft pleas fell on deaf ears, but he could not cut away from her as cleanly as he desired to. It was impossible. She had felt the heat of his fire when it had threatened to consume him; she had felt the ferocity of the flame seared into the supple curve of her skin when he had taken her so long ago. It never felt if it truly was – he could still feel her beneath him whenever she breathed into his skin; he could still hear her breathless and wanting whenever she leaned against him.
The memory clutches still to his mind, refusing to be tucked away into the darkest recesses of his memory as so much else of his life had been – and as the flicker of his crimson gaze is settled upon her, a dark beacon on the edge of a jagged precipice, shrouded in the low-lying mist of the waning dawn. The air current is entangled in her tousled tresses, wrapping them around the left side of her neck, exposing the right side to the pale sunlight. His legs carry him to her, despite knowing it would be best to keep away – that it would protect his own heart; that it would protect hers, though she damned him for trying.
She claimed to be impervious to the anguish and pain that could come with loving a living, breathing flame (fierce, burning, relentless – but easily extinguished). He is not dying but he is no longer clinging to youth as he once had, and time would eventually take him – one day; someday. He was tired. Deeply tired, of the ache, of the pain, of the heartache. Of being loved, and left, over and over. Of never being enough. Of being too much. It is all too much, and perhaps, there is a part of him – however small – that yearns for time to take him! A part of him that aches for Death; for the promise of serenity and tranquility that he had never known.
But when his dark eyes are settled upon the subtle slope of her spine, and up along the muscled curve of her neck and the feminine line of her cheek, he is reminded of his youth, with a stirring in his loin and the pitter-patter of his heart. Try as he might, he could not stifle how he felt for her. A friend, through and through, and the keeper of his secrets – a lover, only once, though he had been tempted more times than he could possibly count to press his lips and teeth into her skin, to take her and bring her to completion as he once had. To let her into his mind, to see how and why he is the way he is – but he would never need to do the latter.
She knew him better than he knew himself.
Gently, the heat of his lips press against the curve of her jaw, where her pulse thrums over the rhythmic pull of the tide crashing against the volcanic rock below. He is silent for a long moment, with the girth of his broad body aligned with her own, staring out into the distant sea just as she has – for how long, he does not know. Yet she is rooted to the very spot where he had turned his cheek; where he had left her in tears (while stifling and burying his own).
He is still angry with himself, but even more so when his whiskered mouth presses another kiss to her jaw, unable to keep himself apart from her any longer.
He is broken – fragmented, never whole – but if she wanted whatever shard was left of his shattered self, who was he to say no (and how could he, when deep down, he longed for it too?)