bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze
if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
He remembers a girl he had met once who had been haunted by noises that were always too loud, too intrusive—who had seemed perpetually on the edge if splintering underneath the merest breath. In some ways, she reminds him of that girl and he tilts his head curiously, as though he could dive beneath the surface of her to dig up the truth of it. In a way, he knows that he could. It would be a matter of splitting her open like fruit, peeling back the edges of her to find the core and sinking his teeth into the pit of it.
But it’s never quite so interesting that way.
At least, not at first.
(There is no telling what he may do later—what he may resort to when his patience wears thin.)
For now though, he gives the barest hint of a smile. Something like a whisper of it. A shadow that barely curves his mulberry lips and his shoulder begins to bleed again slowly (thick drops of blood that drop slowly down the curve) as he pulls up walls around them. They are metaphorical more than physical though he is not certain that she would not feel them if she was to run toward them, but they muffle the world around them until you could hear nothing but the soft inhale and exhale of the two of them.
It is oddly intimate, and he breathes a little easier, knowing that he has put together a somewhat momentary sanctuary for them both—away from the whispers in her mind, away from the monsters that lurked in the eternal darkness, away from the worries that forever plagued him. It was just them.
“In a way, I am always alone,” he says with that same unchangeable expression.
A pause, something that was half breath and half laugh escaping him.
“In other ways, I can find not even a moment of respite."
woolf
I am loathed to say it's the devil's taste