come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
She wants to ask him how he can be so certain that she will be herself again, how he can know that this tempest inside her heart will ever end, ever release her. She does not feel like an ocean, deep and vast and same. She feels like the sand beneath that moves and shifts and disappears in the wild currents that come to tear her away from everything she once knew. It is an unsteadiness that leaves her constantly exhausted, constantly at odds.
She is dissonance.
But she cannot ask him, cannot know his answer in case the words are not enough to make her believe. In case he is wrong, but not as wrong as she is. It is like he cannot see that if she is the ocean and this is her storm, he must let go of her lest he be drowned inside her discordant fury.
It is good that he does not reach for her when she touches him, good that his body does not move to fold around her, because she feels certain that she could not have gone through with it if he had. She could never pull herself from these arms if they had been bold enough to drag her close. It is love, even if it is mangled and broken and wholly unrecognizable - or at least the seed of it, ready to be buried someplace deep inside the cave-ins of her chest.
It’s good he does not reach for her.
When her eyes lift to his again, she nearly flinches at how different they are now. Emptier in a way she had not been expecting. It makes her chest ache suddenly, makes her feel like there is a knot she can only just barely breathe past. It is so like loss. His eyes sharpen a little, and she does not look away, daring him to try and remember what it was she took from him. But his words erase any chance of that, and when he speaks it like a tether between them comes undone.
“You certainly don’t.” She agrees, but her words are made softer by the tiredness in her tone as all the defensiveness drains from her. It is easier now that he does not have the ghost of her in his memory to compare her against. He is handsome like this, with his dark eyes and flirtatious smile, and for a moment she considers letting him get to know her for the night. Just one night, and then they would both be gone with the rising dawn. But she thinks of the way his eyes had burned for her, the way her name had sounded on his lips, and she knows that anything less than him knowing her would just be hollow.
It is another loss, and by her own doing, but she would not undo it.
She remembers back to the first time they had met, and her eyes drift to the place she had buried herself against, the deep curve of his chest. Her dark eyes blink, then travel back up to his face, to his smile, to his beautiful lying eyes that don’t lie nearly as well as hers do. “Of course, but be careful out there.” She almost smiles with remembering (it sits like a ghost in the corners of her mouth), can almost hear these next words in the sound of his voice again, “There are things that go bump in the night.”
even though i try not to
@[fenris]