[private] don't put my love on your back burner. || circinae

[Canaan]

Canaan

Don't put my love on your back burner.
Never let anything that hot get cold.

  ”If you want me to,” he murmurs steadily, though his heart is thrumming within his chest, thrusting itself between the timid gaps of bone and tissue. The adrenaline surges through his veins as the ache that had once been so small enlarges, threatening to fill the entirety of his chest cavity with the heaviness of it. She does not need him, she never has, and he once cherished her strength. Strong, unyielding - a force to be reckoned with, he had said once, and it still rang true. Guarded. Protected.

  In the same breath, it hurt him as much as it tore a wound through his own wayward heart.

  Where had the wild-eyed and wanderlust-ridden boy gone?

  He yearned for her to want him, to need him in some – in any capacity! But no longer does she seek him out (had she ever? It had always been Jah-Lilah that had kissed away her uncertainty; he had been captive either in presence or in mind), and no longer is she unwavering before him. She is as uncertain as to where she her place is in his heart, just as he cannot seem to find his own place in hers. When did it begin to unravel? When did something so beautiful, so deeply touching and heartwarming become so devastatingly tragic?

  ”You mistake me,” he says quietly, his gaze elsewhere – no longer looking to her, but instead to the distant horizon, alight with a splendor of color. He had seen the flash in her cerulean gaze when her doubt began to set in - there was no wolf beneath the sheepish; he had only ever been himself with her. Caring little for structure or for being bound to a single piece of forsaken territory, but he had followed her. He had stayed, because of her, because of love.

   She can only see his uncertainty as doubt in her, when his doubt is within himself.

  But will it be enough?, he had asked her.

  Am I enough?, he had meant.

  Too little, too late, and the realization of how vastly different she is from him rouses tears to brim the ridge of his eyelids, though his heavy lashes attempt to blink them away, not wanting to break before her.

  ”I will always love you,” he says finally, his breath uneven. ”all of me, all of my heart, my mind, my soul, will always love you. I do not love this .. Ischia; I do not love this island or the crown of thorns that you wear.” He pauses then, looking to her, savoring the caress of her lips across his cheek as if it might be the last. ”I will not leave you, but it feels as if you have already left me.”

And if you ever change your mind and want to leave my love behind,
Just let me be the second one to know.

@[Circinae]