She pulls back enough to look up at him, and when she does there is new worry in those bright, bruised eyes. A wariness that bubbles up from someplace deep inside her chest. She can feel how easily he could hurt her, how these emotions are like a blade pressed to her throat and the handle sits patiently within his grasp. But she can also feel how she trusts him, foolishly, perhaps. How everything inside her urges her to lean into the blade, into this pain. After all, she is no stranger to it.
But his words open a thin line along her skin, opening edges that are bright and red and stinging. It feels like being pushed away, makes her wonder if she misread his almost-smiles and the way he’s started dragging her against his chest, running those serious lips over the edges of bone and flesh. Her breath comes a little faster, that wariness shifting into fear, and that fear flooding her veins with a soft kind of adrenaline that pools in her chest. She turns her face from him, that antlered brow and the flowers that climb in wild vines as though to be closer to the sun, fights with an uncertainty of what to say, how to answer him.
It isn’t a competition, it isn’t about better or worse. It’s about the way her heart contracts in her chest when he is suddenly gone from her, about that soul-deep ache when she wakes up from a dream full of adventures with his face, his voice, his careful touch to find that none of it was real. It’s about the moments in her days, thoughts and stories, the sweet things Choke does as he grows bigger each day, it’s the reflex to tell Nightlock, to share it with him. It’s the way her heart feels so soft and radiant when his wings stretch to fill her skies, when he lands beside her and all she wants to do is settle in against the warmth of his body as he draws her close and traces the curve of her cheek.
The way he teaches her without meaning to, that she is not wrong.
But these words catch in her throat, barbed and painful, and no matter how hard she tries she cannot force them to her lips. It isn’t until he speaks again, all grit and gravel as he presses them both together, holds her so firm against the beautiful heart beating in his chest that she finds there are new words, different words waiting on her lips. A confession that makes her feel so bare before him. “It doesn’t hurt so much when I’m with you.” Her life, her past, the truths that sit like thorns beneath her skin.
And suddenly nothing feels close enough, not their chests pressed together or the way his neck drapes so firmly across her shoulders. She’s aching inside, unravelling, and for once it has nothing to do with all the broken pieces she’s built her life upon. She presses into him, and there is some new gentle wildness, like her heart is a bird in her chest and fighting so hard to be free from that cage of bone. But when she speaks it is still soft, still whispered like the wind that rolls off her bright ocean waves. “I won’t ask you to be anything you’re not, Nightlock. I just want you.”
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love