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 smiles at him and he has no choice but to give up on trying to catch his breath.
A fruitless endeavor, to be sure.
With the way she’s looking at him, bold in a way he has never known how to be.
How sweetly her wide-eyed innocence (presumed) could take him to his knees if he let it. Because he does not know how to respond to beautiful things – truly, remarkably beautiful things – except by collapsing into them. He does not know now, he has absolutely no way of knowing, but he’d let her destroy him if it came to it. He’d let her break him down on a molecular level, shatter all that glass and carve out the smooth marble of his heart without hesitation. How foolish he is, in his youth and in his awe of beautiful things.
She says his name and it’s like hearing it for the first time. Has it always sounded like that? It is sweet but it is something else, too. Something like a secret. It makes his lips quiver and the sound of clinking glass betrays him. He shivers with it and he cannot hide it, not with the sound it makes.
He does not know Tephra. He has no reason to. He has traveled as far as his legs could carry him (which, admittedly, is not far with the way that the joints ache after too long because the legs were not built to be made of glass), but he has not committed himself to learning the names of all the places he’s been. But he knows the stars. Of course he knows the stars. He has loved the stars, wondered how it might feel should he take one into the safe harbor of his mouth, swallowed it down and let it pulse in the pit of his gut.
Of course she is from the stars. Only the cosmos could make something so spectacular. She touches him again and he wants to touch her back. How fiercely he wants to touch her back! But he is shy, suddenly, and only smiles at her in that same breathless way when she dusts her nose along the length of his neck.
“Of course,” he murmurs, throaty, the words sticking someplace between his gut and his mouth, “of course you came from the stars.”
She turns the question on him. He cannot know all of the darkness he came from. He cannot know that the mother he knows for his mother is not her real name, that she is not at all who they think she is. He cannot know that his father belongs to someone else. He cannot know these things, so he says the simplest thing. “Glass,” he says. Because he does not know to say that he is also made of heartache.
THOMAS
— and you don't care for me enough to cry —