held on tightly, anyone

[basilica]

She likes it when he smiles.
Because it looks like a secret. Something just between them. And she thinks maybe she should start smiling like a secret, too. Because she smiles loud, for everyone to see, and wouldn’t it be better if he felt like her smiles were just for him, too?

She tries it, mirroring that shadow of a smile the best she can. Fails miserably at it, because it doesn’t fit her face the same way it fits his. Because she is not as quiet and, she suspects, not as kind. So the most she can hope for is that he might like that her happiness is loud, bigger than anything she can fit in her tiny body.

Her eyes light up when he mentions his father. And she smiles real loud as they walk, nodding so enthusiastically that she almost knocks herself off-balance. “I got mine from my father, too,” she says, breathless with wonder. Because it feels like fate almost, feels like they were thrust together on purpose. The two of them there for the very first time, with their matching magic that they’d gotten from their fathers. She wonders, quite briefly, if their fathers are the same. But she is dark. Dark, dark. And he is so very light that it feels impossible.

“I look like my father,” she tells him, all too happy to say it, “my mom is black, too, but she doesn’t have any white. But she gave me magic, too. The kind of magic that makes my legs not hurt when we walk too far.” She is rambling, a horribly unattractive quality, but she is too young to know that yet.

She grins, flush with heat, when he echoes her sentiment. And she turns her head to study him a long moment as they walk, grateful, before she finally fixes her focus to the landscape unfurling around them again. “Do you have any other magic?” 

heaven's gate had such
eloquent graffiti

basilica