The heat nearly explodes between them and he is dragged under by it.
The violence of it is physical and demanding and he is reminded of the wildness of the wolves his father commands—the way that they run through the forest, yipping and howling and biting at heels. It drags rivers through is flesh until he can barely breathe around it. She is everywhere and he continues to breathe her in, continues to feel the way that each moment pulls the strings around him tighter and tighter.
She matches him blow for blow and he hears her snarls and feels her teeth. His body shudders as he drags her closer, as mouth finds flesh again and again, until the rest of his prison continues to fade away.
He would continue, he thinks.
He would continue if it were not for that thing within him—that sense of otherness—that pulls at him like the gravity pulls at the waves. He breaks away but it’s not to spurn her. Not this time. His face still glows with the intensity that leaves him sharp and wanting, the angles pulled taut across his cheekbones and the tension put in perfect clarity in the arch of his neck and the muscles that jump in his jaw.
“Kensa,” his voice is a growl across his tongue, grey eyes bright. “I want you to be more than this to me,” he swallows hard and feels the words weigh on him. She is so beautiful, he thinks, and he cannot deny the way that he wants to consume her; the way that he wants to learn the curves of her, to lose himself in it.
But, for all of his flaws and perhaps because of them, he stops.
He breathes hard and shakes his head as if he could escape his own boiling thoughts.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
