THEY STOOD UP STRAIGHT AND PURE ON THE STALK, GRIPPING THE DARK LIKE PROPHETS
AND HOWLING COLOSSAL INTIMACIES
FROM THE BACK OF THEIR FUSED THROATS
❀
He goes still underneath the brush of her lips, and Bexley cannot decide whether she is pleased or disgusted.
Stop thinking about him. Stop thinking about him. She can’t. All the ways they are similar—golden, though in different shades, and the way his eyes don’t stray from her, and the way she has power over him in less than a word—
Her stomach clenches. August is too still, like a statue, like a butterfly who knows it has been caught. She’s seen it before—the way prey freezes when it sees the flash of teeth. She can hear his breathing. Feel the way his muscles shudder as she passes them. And she could kill him (why does she always think about this?) with one little spark. He would let her. She knows it. Or if not let her, there’s nothing he could do about it, and why does she always think about this, her chest is starting to hurt, he smells like summer and the white sand that patches her legs, why does she always think like this, like a predator. (I am not a predator.)
(I feel like a predator when:)
August touches her.
I don’t want you to touch me. But still she leans forward. You shouldn’t be touching me, but he is, of course he is, and Bexley’s mouth is going dry as it struggles to contain the horror of her bruising heart. Don’t touch me. The close gold of her necklace shifts, and she can feel his lips and the promise of his teeth against her skin, the place where it’s thinnest and her pulse is beating the deepest. An unreasonable shudder passes from her throat to the path he makes across her skin, and she is grinding her teeth trying not to something—please, or don’t, or that followed by a stop.
Stop thinking about it. Bexley closes her eyes. Inhales sharply. I am not a predator—the whole world is out there, and she has not killed it yet. That has to mean something. God, but her whole body is begging to—to do something, anything, and she has never been one to resist impulse—her eyes flicker open again, perfect ice-blue, and with a smile she tugs hard a patch of his bright hair, pulling him toward her. Her magic pulses, a bright dead thing in the pit of her stomach. She tilts her head again, and grins with a cool kind of sharpness.
How could you possibly be losing, she says, sotto voce and siren, When you’re around me.
The slow burn of her eyes is turning slightly unnatural.
And so they decide that sitting up in canopy, singing songs of warning, no longer suits them.
All at once the bird chatter stops and they peer down to wonder how long it will take the horses below to realize that the silence between their words, and their touches, feels like a weight pressing down. They want to fan their feathers, and sigh out songs with the whisper of silk against hollow bone. But there is magic in their empty bones-- magic and nothing else.
The magic is telling them to be still and to be silent. They are listening like puppets because they are not really birds at all.
The silence makes an inhale and all that black weight starts to lift up into the trees where the hollow birds are waiting. Leaves start to shake and turn belly up and it's easy to wonder if a storm is starting to just bloat above island. But it's not rain that starts to fall past the trees down upon the horses talking below.
It's butterflies that are falling fast and heavy.
They only start to fly when they reach the space above Bexley and August. Like kisses they start to land on every inch of the horses, kisses that flutter in a breeze coming from the sea. They do not try to fly away.
@Bexley and @August should have paid more attention to the chatter of the birds. Now a silence is starting to descend from the canopy and the leaves are starting to turn like a storm is coming. At first it seems as if it's going to rain because there is a sound like water hitting leaves that starts high above them, and it's easy to wonder maybe if they are so protected in the thicket that the rain will never find them. But then butterflies start to fall from the trees, thousands of them, and each lands on Bexley and August.
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the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
Oh, how he would laugh to hear her think of him in the same moment as prey.
Or maybe he wouldn’t; maybe he’d only shake his head, press his teeth to the pulse-point below her jaw, bite down on that burnished skin like checking a coin to be sure it’s real gold. His need for skin-on-skin is an easy one to meet, the cheapest thing there is to buy and easiest to barter.
Of course they are still strangers to each other, thoughts and all. Of course there are only the sounds of forest and breathing to fill their heads, and the taste of salt, and his blood running hot and eager beneath the smooth gold of his coat, a rhythm that says this, this, this. When she leans against him, when a shudder ripples her body (the way the whole world had shook, before the sky above the island bloomed black) August grins hard against her. He’s not ashamed at all when he groans, a little, a soft thing, as she pulls his moonsilver hair. Pain is pleasure and pleasure pain because of all of it means he is wondrously, brilliantly alive (not like his parents, not bones at the bottom of the sea, or in the belly of scavengers who are, mostly likely, also dead by now).
August looks up long enough to meet her grin, the purr of her voice, and the scar carved down her cheek (is it true you loved the bastard who gave it to you? what does that feel like?) only makes her look more like a lioness. Well, he says, bring on the claws.
He grins back, a man with two fistfuls of gold and the world unrolling at his feet. “I never implied I was,” he returns, and prepares to make their bodies closer yet -
But the island intervenes. If his mouth was still pressed to her, if his eyes were still lazy-closed with silver lashes casting faint shadows on his dappled cheeks, then he might not have noticed at all. Yet the wind is rattling the leaves, and they curl over like empty palms cupped to the sky, and the birds -
the butterflies -
he watches with wonder (his breath still almost a pant through his teeth) as the first one alights on Bexley’s fine-boned face, opening wings bluer than her eyes. August makes a soft sound of surprise and is hardly aware of it, for now more are landing, fast and thick, and they tickle on his skin, and his wonder begins to turn to alarm when they don’t cease. They are covered in butterflies, ever hue there is, buried beneath a pile of gemstone-bright insects. Maybe they’re drinking the salt of their sweat, maybe her magic has drowned them, maybe they will be suffocated (what a way to die).
He has not yet ceded defeat enough to draw away, but at last he shakes his head, sloughing off insects like rain only for them to settle again, immediately. He can hardly blink without brushing wings, a reverse butterfly-kiss, and even his laugh against her skin only makes them beat their wings back at him.
“Well,” he says, and his voice is a little rough with lust and uncertainty, “I’m not sure if this improves the mood or kills it, but I’m willing to follow your lead.”
THEY STOOD UP STRAIGHT AND PURE ON THE STALK, GRIPPING THE DARK LIKE PROPHETS
AND HOWLING COLOSSAL INTIMACIES
FROM THE BACK OF THEIR FUSED THROATS
❀
Her heart beats loud, so loud. Louder and louder, and then—it’s too loud to be the heartbeat of anything but a giant, and, startled, Bexley looks up.
The first butterfly comes floating down.
She blinks hard. The thing is are a silver so bright it’s nearly transparent, dotted with brief splashes of black and jewel-blue; Bexley has to bite back a sneeze as it lands kiss-soft between her nostrils, batting its wings against her skin. Up close it’s more beautiful than she expected, delicate and intricate as the veins of a leaf. Her eyes go bright-wide. “August,” she breathes, and for the first time since they’ve met her voice is sincere, both in its softness and its surprise.
The ex-regent is even more confused when the second one comes to land on her forehead, a blur of bright yellow and orange. And the novelty has somewhat worn off by the time the third one, patchwork blue and purple, swoops down against her lips. But then it’s far too late to say anything—the air is a swarm of wings and legs and antennae, too thick to breathe, too dense to fight, and even as Bexley shakes her head and sends clouds of them flying they come back to nest on her hair and her shoulders and her scar.
August laughs against her neck, and Bexley’s stomach turns like the wings that beat upon her skin. Her heart feels uncommonly electric. With every breath, the cloud of butterflies around them shifts, then resettles; no matter how Bexley shudders, twists or snaps her tail, they fly up only to come down again. After a minute she gives up entirely. The world closes in, a teeming mass of jewel tones and blood-sunsets. August’s voice sounds again, and oh, she tries so hard to smile. Her mouth won’t quite make the shape.
I should not be here, she thinks, and I especially should not be enjoying it.
The roughness of his voice and the memory of his groan make her cringe just a little. (I should not be here, and I especially should not be doing this.) She rears her head and steps back, dislodging August’s grip on her neck, and when she meets his eyes is with a dry kind of smirk, one that is not sure whether it wants to entice or discourage. “Don’t,” says Bexley. Her gaze narrows. “Follow, I mean. Unless you’re planning on coming all the way back to Solterra. Send a letter, if you’re lazy.”
She bites out a grin and disappears into the hundreds of beating wings.
the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
Later, when he thinks back on their encounter with a grin half-rueful and half-wanting, the thing that will make him pause (more than the butterflies, more than the way his heart had begun to beat like a drum on bonfire night, more than the smell of her, searing sun and melting gold and dust-and-bones) is the way she’d said his name. Supple with wonder and sincerity, silk sheet soft. How rare (he will think) to hear his name so spoken; how he wants to hear it again. That is the treasure he will take from this, then, one solitary piece of gold that leaves him like any gambler - desperate for more.
But that is later. Now they are still in the fairy-tale, or the god-dream, or whatever the island is. Now they are covered in butterflies that leave the dust of magic and color on their skin, the gold of them covered up in a rainbow of hues he’ll never see the like of. It tickles, it makes him want to laugh, it’s claustrophobic and strange, and he is glad he’s not alone.
And then he is. Or nearly is, anyway; when she steps back he looks at her for just a moment, and then shakes himself all over like a dog, big dumb loyal, and the butterflies scatter like water but not for long.
Don’t, she says, and before he can be contrary he shuts his mouth. Yet he does not nod, only stares at her (it should be ridiculous, to see her clothed in butterflies, but somehow it isn’t. No more ridiculous than a tryst between them would have been, here in the breathing jungle, all wet heat).
It’s still easy to smile, easy to say “Happy hunting.” Easy to watch her go, swallowed up by the impossible.
Harder to stand there alone, with a dumb boy’s grin crooked on his mouth, the world so quiet now he can hear the wings of his only companions beating and beating and beating but nothing at all like a heart.
