DESPOINA
Despoina doesn’t know what a normal love looks like, not like him. She barely knows the outline of a faux love. Even her time spent with the family of skeletons and shifters was cut short and colored by her own insecurity, her own pain, her own jealousy. So she never took the time to truly study them together and pick up what it meant to love another heart so completely. To be able to feel that kind of love.
This is the closest she has ever gotten.
The truest it has ever felt.
She knows that this is something precious to her. Something pure that she would kill for. It’s not anything that she thinks outright, but it’s a truth that is buried in her very bones. She knows that she would kill for him without blinking. Would slaughter others without losing a moment of sleep. There is no line that she would not cross, no manner of sacrificing her soul that she would not commit for him.
So she doesn’t balk when he tells her that he knows how she feels and his concern for using her in such a banner. She shakes her head. “You’re not taking something that I am not freely giving,” she murmurs and lifts her head for him to further expose her throat, feeling her heart pounding there, pulse ringing in her ears. It takes a moment for it to take hold. Takes a moment before she feels it snag against her like a hook and her breath escapes her in a violent whoosh. She trembles and leans against him, eyes closing as she feels that sensation winding through her—something familiar and not, something deep and aching.
It hurts, but in a different way than she is used to. It drains the negative emotions and yet she does not feel them leave her. If anything, they are amplified in her breast. They pound against the back of her eyes. Wave after wave of everything he consumes pours through her. The fear. The sorrow. The self-loathing. The anxiety. It all comes crashing down and she does her best to simply ride through it. To breathe.
Hours pass, or perhaps it is merely her perception of time, and when he is done, she remains still for several moments longer. She keeps her eyes closed and leans against him, cheek to his shoulder, her body covered in a thin sheen of sweat. When he speaks, she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, as if in confirmation that she heard him, and she fights for the surface—fights to gain control once more.
Her eyes flutter open and they find his, and she offers a weak smile.
“The second time will be easier.”
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do