an angel kissing on a sinner, tessa

[thomas]

and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try
now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.

He does not allow himself to fall back on his guilt.
He swallows thickly and steels himself against it.
He will not let it consume him, not now.

Now, he will think about lying on the sand and letting the heat warm him from the inside out. It doesn’t matter that the sun is powerless to sink any lower than the glossy surface of his skin – or what’s supposed to be his skin, he thinks. It doesn’t matter that, beneath that surface, he has never been anything but cold. He does not allow himself to dwell or pout because he refuses to rob his sister of this, too.

“That sounds amazing,” he whispers, breathless. Impossible, too, but he feels no overwhelming need to say this. He wants to believe and he wants to let her believe it, too.

He grins, color pooling in his cheeks – a pale pink against the fading copper – when she kisses him. He casts another glance in her direction and nods. “I would go anywhere with you, too, Tessa,” he vows. Even though he knows it’s not true. Even though this is a lie of his own. Because he knows that there are so many places that he will not go. And when the time comes for them to acknowledge that they’d both lied, he knows that he will smile and send her on her way with a heart bursting with pride.

He shifts his focus back to the earth in front of him but a beat too late. He does not see the hole that he steps into up to the middle of his shin. Surprise and primal terror rip a gasp out of his throat and he merely stands there for a moment, staring down at the place where the bottom half of his leg disappears into the earth, too terrified to try to pull it out for fear of what he might find.

“Oh no,” he says in a peculiar way.

THOMAS

— and you don't care for me enough to cry —