maybe you were the ocean
The rain is building cities on their bones; empires rise and fall in the time that they stand with it beating down across their backs. Wane would stand here happily watching civilizations for eternity if it meant that she would always swing her hips the way that she is doing now. “Maybe we could stay in Nerine together then,” she croons, and if he’s honest with himself he’ll admit he isn’t really listening while he nods along in encouragement.
She’s saying words against his skin, weaving futures for the two of them, but the poetry of her body touching his is louder. It’s a mistake he’ll learn soon enough, because her show is spectacular, and she tangles him up in it before he ever knows what’s happening when she says:
“Take me home with you, Wane. Keep me forever.”
The truth is that he would let her teach him lessons in anatomy, or biology; that he likes the curve of her hips, and the slow cadence of her voice, and absolutely the feel of her lips signing morse code against his skin - but he doesn’t want to keep her forever. It isn’t in his nature to keep anything for long. Like his father (at least in his youth), he much preferred a catch and release program.
So here, in the pouring rain, with her lips against his body and her dark eyes, full of expectation, gazing up at him from the bottoms of her long eyelashes, he finds himself in an uncomfortable predicament. He is much too charming today.
For a moment he lets an uncomfortable silence fall between them while he navigates the maze of his brain trying to work out a reason that they could not actually live together forever, but then a gentle breeze smokes itself through the meadow then, and on it comes a single yellow maple leaf, and the clean, crisp hint of fall (and with that all the promises that autumn with a woman brought).
He could make this work.
“After you,” he says, gesturing with his nose to the meadow’s edge that he had come from. At least he could enjoy the view on the way to what was surely bound to be an inevitable disaster.
@[Khuma]