[private] I couldn't utter my love when it counted; birthing

[adna]

one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing
one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide

His affections are fleeting and elusive.

They are like trying to catch onto starlight. They are like trying to hold sand in the palm of your hand. She would chase it forever, if she could. She would run until her feet were bloody and her lungs fit to burst in her chest. She would chase it and never let it go; she would let it tear her apart until she couldn’t breathe.

She is an addict, she knows—or, rather, she would know if she looked at it long enough.

She had grown addicted to the personal torment that is wanting the wind and then feeling it whip through you. The torment of loving shadows and being the sun. But for all of the ache that comes with her want, for all of the thrashing and need, she cannot bring herself to tear away from it—not yet, not yet.

His answer is as elusive as she expects but she doesn’t rage against it. Not today. She just swallows it down, tucks it away, and lets herself be comforted by the idea that he is here at all.

He does not need to open the vaults of his heart as easily as she does her own.

He does not need to unlock the gates and pour it all out for it to be real.

“I just want you to be you,” she whispers against him, into him, feeling the pulse of his heart beneath her lips. Once, she might have imagined what it would feel like to split his flesh apart and feel the way that the pulse pumps out when there is nothing to restrain it, but such things are stilled for now.

She controls the hunger, the animalistic desire for now.

She focuses on the warmth of him and not the thought of the way it looks when fleeing.

“That’s all I have ever wanted.”

Another confession—given so freely and so openly. Adna so unable to hold them back from him.

ADNA