so we let our shadows fall away like dust
He is like an echo, reaching out to touch his nose to hers, closing the distance between them with one single mirrored step. But it is only when she is back against his chest and beneath the warm crook of his neck that she remembers to breathe again – when his lips touch her shoulder in that quiet way and the ache in her chest loosens a little. Not at all stupid. He corrects her instantly, quietly, and she turns to him to laugh in her soft way. She would’ve spoken, was already shaping words with the curve of those pale lips, but the gentle intensity of his gaze startles her. When she finds them, his eyes are not on hers but rather buried somewhere in the ripples of blue and white, in the contrasting shades of her smooth skin. She is hesitant now, distracted, but she speaks anyway and the sound of her voice draws his eyes slowly against hers.
She tells him that she does not know what she wants, but that she knows she does not want this distance he tries to put between them. Then she is quiet again, wordless, wondering at the way he watches her from behind such a heavily lidded gaze. They are closer, suddenly, and she isn’t sure whose choice that had been, which of them had shifted to draw them together, but it feels good and it feels right so she presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, soft and tremulous and etched in her quiet need – a need that, even now, builds like a pressure in her chest.
Except –
The kiss does not end then, quick and brief and shallow like all the others had been. Instead he turns so her lips find his, find more than that spot of twinkling blue, find something that makes her soft and breathless and push against him in a needing way. He captures her, kisses her slow and honest so that her skin feels molten and electric all at once – aching, until he released her and pulled back to watch her in his dark way. She is ready for his eyes when they find her this time, ready for the quiet smolder, the ancient power that burns there at her. Her own face is his opposite, an open window to her heart, to the welcomed turmoil in her chest. Dark and wild and beautiful, burning bright for him, only him in this moment frozen in time.
What is this? Her eyes ask, dark and earnest and fathomless.
What is this? Why does her chest ache and her skin vibrate, why does it feel like gravity is stronger between them, like she couldn’t leave him if she tried. Why does the very idea of leaving him, of returning to a life where they are just happy strangers who cross paths from time to time feel like an ache that thrums marrow-deep in her bones. Her pulse hums now, the breath in her lungs fast and shallow, crushed by the tightness in her chest. She remembers again the worry in his face when he swam back to her side, lifted her nose from the water when fear and exhaustion would have sunk her. She remembers his gentleness and the care she felt in his tongue when it swept across her face to clean the salt, and worry, from the damp of her skin.
Her heart stutters, skips and trips and now, now if he asked why she had not pushed him away that first night, she would have an answer.
He leans close to kiss the side of her mouth, working his way along to her cheek and her jaw and the soft of her throat, and she can only close her eyes and lift her face to him. He breathes against her and suddenly the world smells only of him and of her, of her damp earth and deep forest, of his copper and ocean brine. A shiver starts slow between her shoulders, just a subtle prickling but it gains momentum as it unfurls and rolls down the length of her spine.
Dovev.
He says, and for half a second she does not understand, untangles from him so that she can turn and look across his dark eyes and quiet face, trace the furrows where skin is stretched so tightly over bones that seem sharper than they should be. She finds her answer there, though, in the head that had been bowed against her neck, in the nose that had exhaled sparks against her skin. “Dovev.” She repeats in hum of silvered sound, a name that feels elegant enough to belong to someone like him, strong and whispery and beautiful. Her brow furrows and her eyes grow dark watching him, soft when they trace him. And then she reaches out to brush his forelock aside, to press another kiss at the center of his forehead in a way that is so quietly needing it hurts to breath. “Dovev.” She says again, softer, almost a sigh when she closes her eyes and folds against him, pressed to his chest so she can memorize the thrum of his beating heart. Will he feel the wild in the way hers beats against her breast?
“I’m tired, Dovev.” She says finally, softly, and it isn’t a lie – she can feel a weariness in her bones, a weight behind her eyes making them heavy – but it is maybe a wall, some distance she weaves between them to dull the ache that still, even now, urges her against him. She steps back and reaches up to stroke his neck, follow the arch of his crest to the plate at his shoulder where her tongue slips out to taste the swollen edge of the nearest wound. “I can’t help it either,” tells him quietly, eventually, tracing the edges of so many wounds, pushing pleasure instead of pain into him in the only way she thinks she can, or should, “it’s hard to see you suffer, harder when I can help.” She moves to the bone plates over his ribs, back further to the piece over his haunches and down his leg, gentle and concerned even though the wounds were clean now from the spring.
When she moves behind him and up along his opposite side from hip to shoulder, it is to press her cheek to his neck, to close her eyes and wonder at this weight in her chest, this warm ache that is somehow better and worse when he presses such gentle kisses to her skin, when he cleans the memory of the ocean from the hollows of her delicate face. “Dovev,” a voice that is pale and tremulous like fragile blue petals, a face that lifts from his neck so she can trace her lips along the underneath of his jaw and back to the waiting warmth of his dark mouth, “come lay with me.” Her mouth lingers a moment at the corner of his, breathless and hesitant, and then her lips sink to his, asking and needing and soft where they fit so perfectly, where her tongue slips past to taste him. She turns from him, one dark, indefinable glance back over her shoulder, and disappears beneath the ivy and into a shallow world of stone that smelled only of him.
