They are so new standing here, apart and yet together. They look so young, washed clean of the sins that had permeated their every breath in the previous life (and in this one too, because had she not hungered for him in such an unholy way from the very first?). She is not the young girl who had met him back then—not the one so desperately, greedily in love with Cancer—and he is not the same man.
But they are the same—always the same, always the same.
Even now, her heart so fresh and new already curls inward on the edges, swallowing itself whole on the promise of its greedy nature. She wants and wants already, ready to consume whatever would lay before her like a feast, and it is him—always him now. The image of that gray stallion from so long ago washed away in the years of him. The way her heart had consumed him so wholly. Turned to him so completely.
“Garbage,” she whispers again, because it never sounded like a curse to her. It was him and she lets herself savor the syllables because they are so dear to her. Because she loves the way that the sound anew on her tongue. Because she would drown in the way she feels with his eyes on her once more.
She does not deny the simmering hunger in her heart. She leans into him, closes the distance until she can feel the heat of him. Until her strawberry lips can trace the muscle of his neck. Find the clean way that his flesh stretches across him, washed clean of scars and age. So handsome once more. Always handsome.
“I found you,” she says, as though there was any chance that she would not. As though there was anything for her but this finding of him. As though she had not been pulled back for this very moment.
There are other things that come to the tip of her tongue.
I have waited for you. I have waited for this moment. I would have walked until I found you.
But she swallows them.
She presses kisses into his neck, below his jaw, across his cheek, next to his mouth.
She presses herself into him.
She imagines that they are infinite in this moment—imagines there is nothing else.
I reached out to undress it and love let me down