i don't love you; but i always will. || magnus

[Ellyse]

your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine. i don't love you, but i always will.

  Something is awry. Perhaps it is in the way that his flesh moves beneath her touch - not a flinch, but a shudder, which ripples through the entirety of his broad, muscular frame. Or perhaps it is the way that her name lingers on his whiskered lips, as soft as the whispering wind but loud enough that it draws her nearer to him. Her brow furrows, if only slightly, as she presses the warm breadth of her cheek against his, feeling the sinewy muscles of his hardened jawline shift against her golden skin. Her thick lashes fall in the way of her hazel eyes now, her breath warm and mingling with his own, and she knows she has allowed herself to move too close, to fall too far into an embrace she had grown to crave and to need.

   Time slowly fades as the sun descends lower beyond the darkening horizon, bathing the once vacant blue sky in vivid hues of tangerine and magenta, giving way to the deep, lustrous shade of navy that blankets the starlit sky. Her cheek finally parts from his own, golden-flecked eyes searching his as her own heart palpitates tightly within the confines of her chest. It is not often that he buckles beneath the weight of his own mind, that vulnerability seeps through his stoic exterior of calm decisiveness. Yet when he falls away, anguished by old memories, tormented by bubbling emotion that cannot be stifled, she presses nearer to him - each time and always.

   Her own heart is a mangled, tortured thing - one she guards fiercely, terrified of the agony of heartbreak but all too aware of the pain of loss. With him, her resolve is weakened, and the hefty walls built to surround her aching heart fall away, leaving her bare and exposed in a way that she has never known before. Still, she conceals it. She hides her weakness away, knowing too well his allure and remembering the stench of others lingering on his flesh. She gives herself to him, taking from it what she can and she is content in it - but deep within, a vicious beast of jealousy simmers each time he returns from the embrace of another, and her blackened heart steels itself away once again.

   He could never love someone like her - she knows; it is something that she can feel within the very marrow of her bones.

   She cannot fool herself into thinking that he could.

   His words are hushed, but earnest, and each syllable sends a deep-seated shiver down the length of her sloping spine. Her eyes meet with his, perplexed by the raw emotion wrought within each word, and soon he presses against him and she is powerless to pull away (though not even a single fiber of her being desires to do so).

   Gently, her own neck drapes over his, pulling her chin towards her chest as she pulls him nearer still, using the flattened line of her chin to caress his matted tresses away from his thick, muscled neck. Her eyelids close again as her senses fill with his musk and dried sweat, her own heartbeat thrumming powerfully against her rib cage, along her hollow bones and reverberating from her chest to his ear. Thump. Thump. Thump.

   "You have all of me, Magnus," She murmurs quietly, breaking the silence shared between them at long last. "you always will."

Ellyse

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