Stand face to face with your god
He does not cast her away, though she had not expected him to.
How sweet the thrill that spirals through her as the scales bloom across his skin. He is like she is (though she has no way of knowing that he is so much more than she is, too). But the smile that slips seamlessly across her face is practiced in its sweetness, its breathless wonder.
But the thrill is replaced quite suddenly by something altogether different. A kind of darkness burrows its way into her chest, the place where it lives, beats a wing against her ribcage as she exhales. How obediently she ducks her head away from the flame, exhaling a tendril of bell-song laughter. Flirtatious.
“Will I?” she asks with those same doe eyes. The cold lingers in the marrow of her bones despite the heat of his skin. She does not want to be rid of the cold, not really. She wants it to whittle away at her until there is nothing left. She wants it to devour her.
“You only just got here and you’re leaving already?” A pitiful kind of pout then, the brow furrowed so precisely. “You haven’t even told me your name.”
She is a star thing and isn’t this how a star thing would behave? She belongs to the night sky, not to the dark thing that lives in the narrow space beside her heart. Star things lean into kisses and so she does, too.
