hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Time turns to stone, hard and immobile, and it closes so tightly around her that for several long moments she cannot breathe. She feels paralyzed by the impossibility before her, by the treacherous heat of hope that flares beneath her skin and fills her stomach with a strange, foreign warmth. There is something else there, too, she realizes belatedly as she traces the hard lines of his quiet face. Affection. It softens the strange stoniness of her face, softens the muscles drawn and clenched along her jaw and beneath her dark eyes. It was that pull in her stomach, the one that coaxed her toward him even as she stood frozen, resisting. But it was also the worry that spilled like cold ocean water over her bones, concern for a new tension she thought she saw simmering somewhere deep in those crimson-bright eyes. She had known him only briefly – and then again in the dreams she woke from only to feel deadened inside at losing him again – but she remembered him softer, with less (or maybe different) pain reflecting back from his eyes.
Her chest tightened immediately and she ached to go to him. But something held her back still, and it was the same something that had pushed her away from him before. She watched with a broken expression, a mouth so heavy with sorrow it tipped at the corners and eyes so dark they could swallow entire star systems. Her head sank a little, defeated, and she tried desperately to find that resolve to leave him again, but her legs still refused to move. Thunder boomed around them like an echo of her pounding heart. “Offspring, I-” She tried, shaking her head at him, but the raging of the storm around them drowned out the sound of her small, tremulous voice.
He closed the distance between them effortlessly, half and then half again, and suddenly he was pulling her to the curve of his warm chest and there was nothing she could do but hold him. Her mouth found the arch of his dark shoulder, tasted rain and sweat and dirt, and she traced the slope of his thick muscle with trembling lips until she thought her heart might explode in her chest for the way it pounded against him. Isle. He says, and she can feel herself crumble even further, tipping over the edge of the chasm he had cracked in the ice of her heart. She is suddenly still against him, impossibly still, and only the unevenness of her breathing splinters the sound of the rain.
She tenses suddenly and pulls away from him but she is certain she has left her heart behind because all she can feel in her chest is a cold, empty ache. “No.” She tells him in a voice cut through with pain. She fumbles for more words but her tongue feels thick and swollen, unwilling, and the words come too slowly. “Don’t you see I’m trying to spare you this burden.” Her face flushes with the shame that tends to shadow vulnerability and for a moment she has to look away from him. Lightning flashes gold and fuchsia, illuminating them both, and she lifts those sad eyes back to his face. “Tell me,” she says so softly, barely louder than the rain on the leaves, “how would you feel if someday I slipped.” Her mouth tightens and her brow furrows deeply above her bruised eyes. “How would you feel if one day I knew all of your secrets.”
Isle
