She is like an injured bird in careful hands pressed close to the ache and thrum of his beating heart. It is in this place, in a moment that seems scooped out of time, cut away from the rest of the world that she finally feels a sense of quiet diving through the marrow of her trembling bones. “Shah.” She whispers again for what must be the hundredth time, melting readily beneath his greedy touches because for once she feels needed, for once she feels wanted and it is undoing the ice and steel and stone she wrapped so clumsily around her broken heart.
When her eyes fall on his, shining like twin gold bruises too full of hurt and uncertainty to be recognizable, she flinches. It is an imperceptible motion, the tightening of muscle beneath gleaming black skin darkened with even blacker dapples. She sucks in a quiet breath realizing that of course he would notice and of course he would know, and worse still was that even though she saw those same shadows lurking in the bottoms of his brown eyes, she still ached to tell him everything.
But she couldn’t.
She felt that indecision like a quiver that started in her chest, rippling outwards through her ribs.
She would not add to the weight that seemed to be crushing him already, an entire world he tried to carry on his shoulders.
But her name is on his tongue and his mouth is pressed to her dark, trembling neck. His eyes close and the weight disappears and for a moment, just a split second, he is just as she remembers. She cannot help but stretch her lips to his face, to touch the absence of his smile and furrow of his heavy brow. “Why are you here, Shah?” She thinks back to that day in the meadow and her heart thumps in her chest, but she remembers that they had both been there to hide from their personal demons. Looking at him now, at the tension in his neck and remembering how his touches had been just as greedy as hers, she cannot help but wonder if they are both hiding from the world again.
The forest was already dark and shadowy with the sun being chased off by the branches and pine trees and thick undergrowth, but even as her eyes trace the shape of a face she finds so devastatingly perfect, the forest darkens further. She turns her face from him reluctantly to notice the darkness seems almost complete now, like hours had passed without her noticing and nighttime had sunk from between the stars to mix with the murky light. Her brow furrowed as she turned to look back to Shah, but his expression seemed to remain unchanged so she buried her uncertainty in the dirt beneath her feet.
“I-” her jaw tightened and her gaze dropped to trace the shape of the grass crushed beneath their feet, “I’m a mom now.” Her eyes didn’t lift to his, not now, not yet, she didn’t trust her face. But this felt like a compromise, an easy truth. He didn’t need to know she had thought it was him at first, that magic at been at play. Nor did he need to know she wasn’t remotely ready to be a mom, but there was a small part of her that wondered if he would guess at that anyway.
ILKA
makai x oksana