With her mouth against his neck, her pulse stills, the swells of anxiety sinking quietly beneath her skin. She can taste sweat and dirt, can taste summer on him. Beneath that she can feel the soft give of flesh, the flex of muscle. He’s real. The thought shapes from the doubt in the shadows of her eyes. Real. But when she pulls back and there is no warmth, no proof, the doubt flashes dangerously across her black and indigo face. Nothing was real anymore, there were only memories haunting like ghosts, sticking like burrs. Only an unshakeable hollowness, a sense of shame in having been manipulated so thoughtlessly against her will.
As if remembering were a dangerous thing, it is, it is, there is a sudden pressure in her mind, like being submerged under miles of ocean. She reels back a few steps, awkward on startled, rigid legs, and shakes her head once, twice. The feeling fades almost as soon as it had come, but she can’t shake the feeling that the thoughts had belonged to someone else. Her eyes flash warily and lift to his, but she says nothing.
There are no words.
Not anymore.
But then there are words on his lips, a dangerous question, and she wonders if maybe the fog that had swollen her head would be better than this. Her skin ripples over muscle that seems unable to stop trembling, but she notices the same of him and somehow this makes it easier. Easier, until the question takes shape like a knife to her chest.
He knows.
But of course he did, and she had recognized it immediately in him. It had been what simultaneously drew her in and held her at bay. She flinched anyway, wounded, her jaw clenched so tight her teeth had begun to hurt. “I don’t know.” She tells him in a voice drawn so tight the words themselves fray at the edges. It’s a lie and it isn’t, the truth but it isn’t. “There was a dream,” an impossibility, “a nightmare.” She watches him uncertainly, overwhelmed by the urge to make sure he is still flesh and bone, that there is still blood flowing past the pulse at his throat. “I think I’m being punished.”
She knows she speaks nonsense, an unintentional riddle, but the truth would be no clearer.
The truth would be so much harder to believe.
Except he knows.
Those desperate green eyes shift from the ghosts in his eyes to the curve of his ribs. She watches his sides rise and fall beneath the shuddering flesh, counts his breathes like a saving grace. Alive, she thinks. We’re real. Her gaze sharpens and narrows, jumping instantly back to his face. “It isn’t my color, though,”, her tone is as sharp as her expression, and she emphasizes the most important part, “it isn’t mine.”
MALIS
makai x oksana