so we let our shadows fall away like dust
I grew up in the meadow, he murmurs and she glances sideways at him thoughtfully, tracing the lines of his thin, elegant face, the ridges of bone with edges stained a frothy pink from him blood. “We were neighbors then.” She tells him with that soft, quiet smile, eyes still dark and warm in the maze of his sharp features. “The cave was in the forest near where we first met.” The words are out before she hears them, before she realizes, and when she does it is already too late to take them back. Those black eyes will drift to her neck again, to the old scar carved by his teeth. She’ll watch his face warp with emotions she will be unable to name, things he will try to conceal from her – or maybe he will reach past that for stoicism, turn off and away from her. So reaches for him and bends to him, soft and sweet and supple against him when she extends her nose to trail kisses from the corner of his lip, along his jaw and to his cheek.
She pulls away at the damp warmth of his blood against her skin, but it isn’t disgust, not repulsion forcing her back. She doesn’t mind the copper taste of it across her lips and on her tongue anymore – it had been strange at first, unpleasant in its sharpness, but she had adjusted quickly. Neither does it bother her that she can see smears of his foamy pink against the satin white of her delicate nose, disappearing where it overlapped into the deeper blue-black of her cheeks. When she notices his grimace she scolds him with a kiss, tugging lightly at his lower lip with the flat of her teeth in a way that is meant to distract him as he now distracts her from the ache in her chest. She is glad to have something to give herself to, something besides the pain of the memory of that last kiss and Stillwater's retreating back disappearing into the trees. Even now she can feel its weight in the back of her thoughts, sharp and patient and eager to revisit her just as soon as she surrenders to sleep.
She returns to his wounds again, an endless chore she did not mind at all, touching him and tasting him and filling him with pleasure instead of pain. He stiffens and she feels that too, frowns first and then smiles quietly despite herself at the moan that follows so softly like the fog of winter on someone’s breath. But then she notices the tremble in his legs, the raggedness of his breath beneath her lips and she wilts just a little, worried, remembering how she had undone Stillwater in this way. Remembering how he had tried to stop her, settle her and she had pushed anyway.
Now he was gone, lost to her.
Her lips are gone from his skin sharply, uncertainly, though her eyes stay on the wet wounds in a worried way that even now begs her closer. It was agony to watch him hurt in this way, to let him suffer when she could soothe him at least momentarily with the gentle of her eager lips. But was she soothing him? Or would she just bring more pain to him, to both of them. Pain, probably. But he lifts his head to peer at her even as she watches him and it is enough to coax her back and beneath his neck, enough to pull her lips to his mouth where she leaves another kiss in that deep and gleaming blue.
He swears under his breath and she flinches, misunderstanding his pleasure and resulting distress for some strand of resentment at the easy way she touched him – too easy, maybe, but something had softened in her after their swim, when he held her nose aloft so it wouldn’t fill with water, when they reached the shore and he cleaned the salt and sea from her face with such gentle concern. It was dangerous to be cared for, made it easy to mistake that kindness for something more than it truly was, it planted the seeds for something dark and invasive to grow where it should not.
“I’m sorry.” She whispers beneath him, still misunderstanding, bent and soft and hesitant. “I think I might be a ruiner.” But this confession comes so much more softly, dressed and pressed in a kiss against his chest so that maybe he won’t hear the broken voice of her keening heart. She wasn’t his burden to bear.
So she reaches around him instead with her magic, using it to draw him closer, to soothe his skin and his worry and the way she made him so ragged. But then he opens his eyes to her again, allows her back in more warily this time, and she is startled to see that it isn’t guardedness that greets her but something quite its opposite. Need, want, a strange kind of longing, but no resentment. She knows she shouldn’t, knows it’s cruel to both of them, but she touches her lips to his chest as if to quiet the way it heaved shallowly at her, drifted up and along his throat to his jaw and then kissed the corner of his mouth again in a quiet, fragile way.
When she slips out from beneath his neck it is slowly and with so much reluctance, but she wants to see his face now, all of it, dark and beautiful and etched with bone and bright shadow. Command me. He says, a plea, but she only shakes that small, dark head at him gently. “Never.” She is quiet in her refusal, steady, watching him with eyes that are soft and brown and luminous against his face. “Let these be the only things that command you.” She tells him softly, stepping close again to touch her lips first to the heart thrumming beneath his chest, then to the silk of his forelock and the mind beneath.
For a long moment she watches him, warring with the knot of feeling unraveling in the pit of her belly. She loved Stillwater, her deepwater stallion from the watery belly of Sylva. She loved him. But then what was this tether she felt tugging at her belly when she tried to look away from this man, bone-white and dark, broken and beautiful. Just pain, perhaps. A shared brokenness. Her brow wrinkled in a quiet way, drawing gentle furrows of thought across her cheeks until finally she touched his neck and turned from him to head in the direction of the nearby spring. “Come here –“ she falters, sad again to have no name with which to call him by, but the frown fades to be replaced by something lighter, “come here and let me clean your wounds.” She wades in up to her chest and pauses, turning her head back over her shoulder to watch him, will him closer. “I’ll be gentle.”
