to find freedom, avelina

[isakov]

throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

There is something deeply peaceful about her, something that draws him to her. Something dreamy in the way she speaks and he thinks that he’d like to live inside her chest, to listen to the sound of her voice for centuries. Let it lull him gently to sleep.

He wonders if she’d let him.

He ventures even closer still, like perhaps he’s hoping that whatever dreams live in her throat will wrap themselves sweetly around him, too. He wonders what it means that she’s used to the quiet. And he thinks of Sleaze, how he had ached for the quiet. How different they are. How equally spectacular. How evenly matched they are in the way they catch him by hooks in the belly, draw him closer.

Just as she wants to touch him, he wants to touch her. A feeling compounded by her insistence that he is not disturbing her.

He smiles like moonlight on still water and ducks his head something bashful. Like she is somehow making an exception for him, like it means something important that she has not asked him to leave when she so easily could have.

But not only does she not send him away, she shares with him her name. And what a lovely name it is!

“Avelina,” he echoes, testing the names weight and shape on his tongue. It rolls smooth out of his mouth while he considers her. “My name is Isakov,” he tells her and then reaches out to touch her shoulder, bumps it so gentle that it’s almost as if he has not touched her at all. “Why are you so used to the quiet?” How it pains him to think of her alone.

isakov

@[Avelina]