leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
For the space of a breath he thinks she might touch him. He nearly trembles with the anticipation of it. The way she’s looking at him, so quiet in the darkness that he is forced to wonder if they exist at all. If he has merely dreamed this. It gets his head swimming and it is only after she draws away that he releases the breath he had not realized he’d been holding. There is some new ache in the cage of his chest, something like a crater, like she had carved something out of him when she’d come close enough to breathe her but had stopped just short of touching.
He shifts his weight and studies her smile. Listens, quite intently, to the sound of her laughter. It has its own gravity, he finds. It tugs everything in him in her direction, even if he does not physically move any closer. She tilts her head and, absently, he mirrors her.
He exhales a thin breath as she answers, shakes his head subtly. Enough to be seen but not enough to disturb the rarified air around them. He searches her gold eyes a moment before he speaks. “I don’t think you could trust me with everything,” he tells her, honest. Because he knows, even now, that he cannot be trusted with hearts. With emotions that matter. In this, he will bring nothing but ruin. But she will be the only one he ever warns.
He is not disarmed by her question. She can see into his mind and he has made no effort to stop her. It is natural that this thought would catch her attention, isn’t it? Wouldn’t she want to investigate this way in which he thinks they might be similar?
They are still close enough that either of them could reach out and touch the other and it makes his heart beat sideways. But he tips his head to peer steadily at her chest. He sees nothing but fire there. The flicker of flame in the shimmer that lives in them all.
“Fire,” he says and his smile deepens as he shifts his eye back to catch hers again. “Is it fire that you love?”
@[Sunlight]