so we let our shadows fall away like dust
The worry that stares back at her from those soft green eyes only makes the guilt heavier, makes the pain sharper, and she flinches again and turns a shoulder as though to hide from it. “I didn’t know.” She says softly, brokenly, her voice shallower than a whisper and still she cannot bring her eyes to look back and against that steel face. “I didn’t realize.” There is a numbness seeping into her chest now, a distance she crosses where Djinni cannot reach out and touch her, where those words like thrown blades cannot bury themselves in the soft of her heart. It feels safer here, quieter where she is separated from the truths that make her ache like this.
Her eyes are still elsewhere when Djinni’s attention settles against the blue of Luster’s barrel, when she traces the smooth line of slender rib and the lack of fullness in a stomach that is too young to support life. It is a relief that she does not see it, does not notice or else the heat in her skin would have rivaled the heat of the sun. It is not something she hadn’t already considered, not something she didn’t want. And with him, that deep-water stallion who had traced such quiet kisses across her neck and her face.
Instead it is only when Djinni charges after her that Luster’s eyes manage to snap back to that beautiful steel face, suddenly sharp in their surprise, dark in their misunderstanding. The emotion is easy enough to trace because Djinni makes no effort to hide it – rage, and it contorts her face, drawing deep slashes of tension like fingers dragged through lines of soot. She thinks the woman must have seen the truth in her heart, somehow, the secrets in her eyes. Must know how Luster has lain with him in the back of his cave and then again beneath his little lake. But then she stops, she pauses, tilts her head at Luster and the rage fades.
Yes, and at least this is better, somehow, even though it is worse, too, I do. Luster nods once, wordless at first until those treacherous lips find and take shape around a single, smooth word. “Good.” But she is not ready for this blade when it tears into her gut, not ready for the jagged memory it brandishes at its tip. Hey, she had said to him once, brushing her nose against his neck, if you aren’t careful I might start thinking you care.She had been teasing, trying to lighten the weight of their quiet reunion, but he had turned and touched his lips to her nose and answered, so surely, Good. It is a broken word now, with edges too sharp to fit in her mouth – she had tried, and now she bleeds for it.
She isn’t sure what else Djinni says, if anything, chooses instead to remain as safely distant as she can until suddenly she is against a chest and beneath a neck, reflexively soft in an embrace she can make no sense of until she does hear what Djinni says. He hurt you. It is so unexpected, so absurd, that Luster nearly laughs aloud as she pushes Djinni back and away. But the sound is mangled, her chest is still mangled, and instead the laugh is somewhere between muffled and choking. “Never.” She says, suddenly sharper, suddenly darker when her eyes find and settle firmly against that beautiful steel face. “He never hurt me.” She means in every way, never with his kisses or his teeth, never physically, and even now she is not sure this other pain comes from anywhere but her own treacherous heart.
“I hurt me.” There is a scowl on her face now, faint, but it draws strange lines of tension across her cheeks. “He never promised me anything, no part of himself, and I never asked,” she pauses and that distance lengthens and shortens, wavers until her eyes are dark and hazy and drifting, “I just chose to love him anyway.” Another pause, this one shorter, and her eyes narrow just slightly with something that looks so much like uncertainty, maybe regret. “But it was my choice, only mine.” Perhaps the kisses hadn’t helped, that definitive good or they way they had slept curled together in the dark. But he had never, never promised her his love. She hadn’t needed him to, she reminds herself now, steeling her heart.
But there are new words and maybe they are meant to be kind because they come with squeezes and a kiss that is soft on her forehead. I am sorry. And Luster cannot understand why Djinni would ever feel the need to apologize now, here in this ugly, awful moment. I will make him sorry too.
It must take a moment for Luster to understand the words, several moments after she had first heard them, but when she does she is fire and feral and wild in her worry, in what must be fury but it is so new to her. “You won’t.” She says, sharp eyes and a hard frown, using the broken edges Djinni’s truths had carved into her like a blade. “Don’t.” She doesn’t realize how this wild worry has aged her face, how suddenly she is a woman and not a girl, carved and made beautiful by her intensity. Light and shadow snap and arc across her skin, the emotional manifestation of an anger she is barely containing. “He isn’t like this,” and despite the way her face is sharp and wild and carved from stone, her lips are soft when they touch that dark coat, a coat that was just recently orange then green then steel again, “he isn’t for fun, he is not a whim. That isn’t love, that is need.” She pauses and the intensity softens a little, the light and shadow sinking sleepily against her skin. For a long while she turns her face from the dark mare, hiding her eyes until the pain is less, until the dark is pushed back, until her words are soft like starlight. “If you love him, you protect him,” a pause and her jaw tenses, furious again though she hides it better now, “you won’t ‘make him sorry too’.”
