I make mountains out of stones and with that timber, burn a hundred fires
He asks her questions that she already knows the answer to.
She knows what the ocean is like because she has spent so many hours testing her youthful limbs while skimming the top of it. She knows it because she discovered her gift with the white caps and the squeal of the dolphins and the storms that turn something so beautiful so dangerous so quickly.
But she cannot confess such things and so she lies, not for the first time.
It is an innocent lie, she tells herself, because it needs to be said.
But it still tastes bitter on her tongue and finds that she hates herself for how quickly it forms there. How easy it is to wave together and how she does not even flinch when she looks at him as she says it.
“I imagine it can be both,” she hedges her bets, even though she knows it best when the cold is bitter and can bite through hair and flesh. “I think if we went right now, it would be sunny and warm.” She tips her delicate head back, her pink eyes closing against the sun that washes over them both.
“We could go and lie on the sand and let it warm us down to our marrow.”
She flinches then, a sudden and passing moment as she wonders if he even has marrow.
Or whether he was glass all the way through.
Smoothing it over, she presses another kiss to his cold cheek.
“I would go anywhere with you, Thomas.”
TESSA