I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.

He wonders if he’ll ever get used to it.
How willing she is to meld into him.
How she curls her body to fit it perfectly against him.
And even with the time that has passed and the weight she has lost, she still fits against him as if she were made specifically for that purpose.

Perhaps he had been a fool to so willfully ignore this. He remembers, though, how she’d said that she thought she was meant to find him and he’d responded in the only way he’d known how, by turning it into a joke. Because he hadn’t known how to believe it. Not until now.

They were made for each other and he could not ignore it any longer. Despite the way that they sometimes mixed like oil and water, refusing to bend to each other’s wills. Despite the way they fought, trying desperately to get to the root of each other’s hurt, to plunge a blade into the still-beating heart. He’s never believed much in destiny, but she tells him that she loves him in return and he thinks this is the closest he’ll ever get.

She kisses him and there is a glimmer of a smile in the furthest corners of his mouth as he lifts his head to lay his cheek to rest along the ladder of her spine. He is content, for the moment, to simply siphon the heat from her.

“Now we’ve just got to learn how to do it the right way,” he mutters and then exhales a breath of laughter.

BETHLEHEM

I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.

I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.

He knows that she’s right.
Were he a romantic he might have thought it some kind of magic.
That the two of them had found each other and, instead of subscribing to the natural order of things, forged their own way, simply made it up as they went along.
But he is a simple man who understands that that specific kind of magic does not exist in the world. Love is not a song or a poem or any other number of romantic things.

He understands now that love is hard but it is worth it in the quiet moments like these. When she presses her mouth against his skin and fills him with heat. When he lays his head to rest along the length of her rocky spine and feels her move beneath it. When they breathe in tandem, long and slow and even. When she is not threatening to rip his throat out or leave. When he is not being willfully ignorant or obtuse.

He laughs, buoyed by the light in her. “It’s going to be hard,” he warns, though he knows she is just as acutely aware of this as he is. He draws back then, kisses her forehead. “But I wouldn’t want to figure it out with anyone else.”

BETHLEHEM

I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.