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 draws away from him and all of the warmth is drained out of him.
He wants to reach for her, to draw her back in, to tuck her against him so that the heart might go on beating in that funny way that made him dizzy. Instead, it pulses at the base of his throat now. It shivers with a kind of guilt he doesn’t know how to identify.
There is a strange fluttering in the pit of his gut. Something taking flight. Something that spirals, heady, through the network of his veins. It is troublesome, in a way, because he has never felt anything quite so unnerving in his short life. But it is also the most brilliant he has ever felt – as if he has swallowed stardust and it has turned him effervescent.
The stars are beautiful, but they hurt, she says and a cloud of confusion darkens his brow only briefly before it is gone again. Because he cannot look at her with darkness. Because she is certainly the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and the expression cannot help but lighten when he looks at her. The eyes wide, greedy. The mouth turned up at its corners. The breath quick and light.
She turns her gaze on him again and he is silently thankful that they’ve stopped walking, otherwise she might have knocked him off-kilter with the way she looks at him. It quickens his pulse. It makes his head swim. And he is so young and so foolish and he will one day look back on this moment and think about what a fool he had been. But now he just grins at her, awash with heat. She is not the first to call him beautiful, no, but the word sounds so sweet coming out of her mouth that it makes him sway on his feet.
He should thank her, he knows. Blush and look away. Find some shame. But he just goes on staring at her for a moment, his head tilted slightly. As if he’s trying to figure out how the two of them have ended up in the same place at the same time. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he tells her, “and I think I’d let you break me up into tiny little pieces.” It is a romantic notion, certainly, but it is delivered by a child’s mouth and comes out funny. Alas, he does not laugh. Just sucks in a sharp breath and holds it.
THOMAS
— and you don't care for me enough to cry —