so we let our shadows fall away like dust
He laughs and wades in behind her, the mass of his armored body throwing ripples of displaced water in her direction, splashing up to dampen her hips and shoulders. She turns to move to his side, soft and content and quiet in those dark eyes until he shakes his head and moves away from her. Stay there. He says so firmly it feels like a hand against her chest forcing her away. The sudden change in him is so confusing, so disorienting that for a moment she can only watch him wide-eyed and wounded in her hesitance. At one time she might have followed him anyway, soft and submissive, pressed stubbornly to his side with her lips tracing silvered kisses against his neck. But she is reminded once more of what came from pushing Stillwater, of how he had looked at her with something that darkened his features. Disgust, maybe, or regret? In her haze she had not been certain, but it was different from the way he had smiled at her before, from the way he had memorized her face with the warmth of his lips.
It doesn’t hurt. He says this more gently, with a subtle kind of darkness etched into the shape of his voice. But even this makes her hesitant, wary when her eyes drift back to the smears of dark red gleaming iridescent against the black. How could that not hurt? The wounds seemed ragged to her, ruined at the edges where they wore endlessly against the plates of bone that spread them into open, gaping mouths. They bled when he moved, wept for their own misery when he would not. And it was hard to say for sure, time and the dark had warped her memory of that night, focusing on the longing buried in those kisses instead of the teeth he carved into her neck, but when she looks at the bones along his thin body, she is certain there are more. Yet she says nothing to him, nothing of this assurance that feels like a lie pressed carefully into her hands.
He disappears beneath the surface and, without his eyes pinning her in place, dark and firm and willing her back, she drifts toward him again. The space between them only shrinks by a foot or so, but it is enough that she can see the trails of red spilling off of him and drifting along in a lazy way to mark the pull of the invisible current. She watched until it disappeared, until the water ran clear, wondering how often he had bathed like this. Washing himself away. He breaches the surface and his mane falls wetly against his neck, clinging to bone and skin alike, filling the hollow trenches in his neck that make her chest hurt. You should probably not touch me anymore. He says and her eyes snap sharply back to his face, instantly blank behind a mask she pulls up hastily so that he will not see how deeply that request wounds her.
I mean, clearly I like it. He adds as she watches him step back out of the spring, shaking off the excess water carefully, Normal places are fine. But.. Around the bone is extra sensitive, and.. I kinda can't really help it. She is quiet for a moment watching him, though her brow is furrowed and her face is dark with something unnamable. C’mon. Let’s get you inside. Tension uncoils in her belly, touching her shoulders and tightening in her hips until at last the mask slips and there is only uncertainty left in its place. “I don’t understand.” She says finally in that soft, hesitant voice, abandoning her place in the water to come stand near him again – though she ached to be so much closer. She has already forgotten the water trailing down her damp sides in soft rivulets, distracted by their distance and closeness all at once. Then, stretching her nose to him in a delicate way, “I like it, too.”
It felt safe curled against him, tucked beneath him, pressed to the humming, beating warmth of his dark chest. She felt anchored with his lips against her neck and her face, tethered when she pressed the same unnamable kind of affection to his dark, beautiful skin. But he had severed that with this distance, cut off his gravity and left her floating lost and uncertain, unsure how to make her way back to him. “I came here with you.” She whispers, takes a step closer, cursing the way that she is pushing again, cursing her wretched stubbornness. “I didn’t come here to be away from you.” She holds her breath and ducks beneath his neck, pressed to his chest and with her curve of her cheek flat to the ridges of bone on his shoulder. The coppery smell of a wound sits just below her nose, but she resists the urge to clean it, to coax another moan from the cavern of his chest. It’s so close though, close enough that her whiskers must tickle it, close enough for him to feel the warmth of her breath on his skin.
“I’m not deaf, you know.” She says then of his moans, the quiet ones he tries to hide in those moments her lips find the pink, ragged skin. Her eyes soften and she shifts to look up at him in a wondering way, soft, when she kisses him once at the side of his mouth and turns to look elsewhere again. “And I’m not entirely stupid.” She laughs quietly, an almost bitter sound on those soft, pale lips, and for a moment her gaze drifts upward, lost in a dark sky filled with stars that remind her of the deep blue on his legs and mouth. But then she returns to him, confused and full of half-way thoughts that kept slipping through her fingers, pieces of truths too jagged to hold on to. She doesn’t love him, she barely knows him. This feeling in her belly isn’t that – neither is it the lust that landed her on the shore beneath Stillwater. It is something entirely different, something that makes her feel bound to him in whatever way he would allow, inexplicably soft, if only he would stop pushing. She couldn't name it if he asked her, couldn't understand the tangle in her chest if she tried - and honestly, she didn't want to try, not now. "I don't know what I want," a pause and her brow furrows again, deep and uncertain and beautiful, eyes half-hidden behind the tangles of a dark forelock, "but I know don't want the distance. Not from you."
Then, so quietly, so dark-eyed and vulnerable, she lifts her lips to his mouth again to leave one last tremulous kiss against the deep blue of that soft hollow.
