hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She hardly notices the storm either, not even when the rain deepens and the beads of water should feel like bullets bouncing off the bruises on her dappled brown skin. It is only when she pulls away from him that the rain and the cold have a chance to sink like winter beneath her skin, like ice floating through her veins. She regards him with dark eyes full of bruises and a shiver ripples through her once, twice, and then it settles inside her unending. But the cold she feels in her chest has little to do with the weather and everything to do with the distance that stretches like a vast chasm between them. It is this distance that has carved her bleeding heart out and lain it to rest in the dirt at their feet.
“Offspring.” She breathes, and suddenly the space carved out between them feels impossible and impassable, and she can see something changing in the bottoms of those bright red eyes. Pain, she realizes, she wonders, she cannot believe. But there is something unraveling quietly in his face that she thinks she might possibly recognize, something kindred in the worst of ways. The muscles tighten in his face, in the curve of his neck and the slope of strong shoulders. She eases forward reflexively and all she wants to do is trace the quiver of his skin with the soft of her dark, whiskered mouth until the tension bleeds away in the rain.
But he stops her with his voice, with words he flings at her like stones even though she thinks he didn’t mean too, thinks he couldn’t possibly understand why they hurt so much. Of course she felt like a burden, of course she cared too much to put that on him, but it would kill her to put it into words again, to let the shame bleed bright and red over her skin like the wound it truly was. But the next bit is worse, she thinks, as she flinches at his words and closes her eyes to see if maybe this might steady the way she swayed on her feet. “A small part of me.” She repeats in a whisper voice, in a voice cut through with pain and bitterness and laughter that mixed in an ugly way. Her eyes open again and she tips her small face up to him imploringly, blinking to keep the rain from dripping like tears in the hollowed lines between bone and muscle. “You don’t see it, do you?” Her heart stutters in her small chest but she only shakes her head and laughs, a laugh laced heavily with pain and incredulity. “Every part. Every part of me wants to be here. This is all I want, Offspring, but I am scared to death of dragging you to my dark places.”
She does step forward now, silent for a heartbeat while her lips find the curve of his heavy jaw, and then, “But you can do better than me. You deserve better than me.” There is so much sadness in the furrowing of her brow, in the tension that touches her mouth and traces up to her jaw.
But then his lips are against her cheek, his face pressed to hers, and suddenly she is crushed back to the curve of his chest and it is this moment that she wishes to live in forever. I cannot let you. He says and she hopes it is a promise because the knot twisting in her stomach is almost unbearable. They stand that way for so long, and it doesn’t matter because time has lost all meaning anyway. She loses herself in the way their hearts beat together, in the heat of his skin against hers and the way her lips taste like rain from his skin where she leaves a trail of faint kisses along the ridge of his dark shoulder. He speaks and she finds she even loves the way his voice rumbles in his chest, like a hum of sound against his rain-slick skin.
“Offspring,” she says and her voice is pitched so low with uncertainty, “if you take one night from me, all the rest will be yours too. I can’t do halfways. Not with you.” The warning in her broken voice is evident as she shifts against him. But this time she doesn’t pull away, this time she closes her eyes and presses her face against the warmth of his thick, dark neck. And then, “Are you sure? Are you sure you want this night.”
Are you sure you want my forever, she doesn’t say.
Isle
