[private] draw the thunder down, colby

[thomas]

and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try
now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.

She touches him and it hitches his breath.
She touches him before he has fully registered that she’s there at all.

And when he pulls back his head to get a good look at her, the heart stumbles in the smooth cavern of his chest. Has he ever seen something so beautiful? It registers that she’d said something in greeting, but he is perhaps too involved in trying to jumpstart his own heart to have caught it.

It does not occur to him to be embarrassed by his breathless wonder, the bewildered way he studies her. She touches him without hesitation. As if he’d invited her to do it. And if does not occur to him to shy away. Despite the way he burns with something he does not fully understand. She touches him and he thinks that maybe he can feel even an ounce of the warmth of her mouth. But he’s imagined it, certainly. The heat he feels is internal.

This is it, the most powerful thing he has ever felt. More powerful even than his wanderlust, his want to swallow up the whole world. Perhaps it is because she is the first stranger who has ever touched him or perhaps because she is undoubtedly the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

He blinks his bewilderment and then smiles slow. She’d seen him and then she’d touched him and he’d been set ablaze and it was really that simple. They walk in step for several paces before it occurs to him to stop. Because he is no longer cautious but he is not reckless either and she has arrested his attention so completely that he cannot tear away his gaze long enough to even glance at the ground.

She speaks then, again, and it is the first thing she says that actually registers. Desire. He does not yet know what the word means. But he will come to know it soon enough.

“My name is Thomas,” he says, perhaps a little dumbly. The grin remains. He is bewitched. “Where’d you come from?” he asks and then tilts his head. “Where have you been?” As if he’d been waiting for her.

THOMAS

— and you don't care for me enough to cry —

@[Desire]