I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It is overwhelming, the pace with which this happens – from stranger to quiet to this, now, Isakov pressing against him. Sleaze doesn’t know what to do with himself, with the tenderness that is bestowed upon him in these gentle movements.
Isakov is warm, a contrast to the cool rush of the river. Sleaze is warm, too.
And quiet.
He exhales and his breath makes a few strands of Isakov’s mane flutter.
He thinks, in the quiet, that maybe he could get used to this. That maybe this is what others spoke of – this warmth. This quiet. Sleaze had barely known to want it, he did not have the materials with which to build such an idea, having lived so long in his disruption.
He knows, now, tastes it on his lips like honey.
He listens to the other’s question and wonders what kind of answer he can give. It’s too much, to explain how his world fractured, how another life unraveled and burned and then he was back in this body with those memories brimming, spilling over and they weren’t real but oh they were --
No. He will not taint the quiet with such madness.
“I lived somewhere else and died and came back here,” he says, a streamlined, whitewashed answer because he does not want to sully this, “and when I came back, my mind was never quite...quiet.”
He should stop there. He should not question this, should accept it and cling to it while it lasts. Should not look the gift horse in the mouth, as it were.
But Sleaze is quite the fool.
“Why?” he asks, “why are you helping me?”
Sleaze
@[isakov]