I loved him (i think) -
stupid lamb in a slaughterhouse
stupid lamb in a slaughterhouse
❀
It is a crime to be so terribly soft. It is an ugly thing, that the beating of her heart is so awfully emphatic. For the first time the steel of her bones, the iron of her blood, is not strong enough to withstand her heart - the emotional seasickness that washes over her as she watches him with those bright, bright eyes, luminous, extortionate, nothing but a vessel for roses and gold.
There is nothing funny about this any more. Bexley cannot laugh at the way he watches her, or the subtle, religiously dissolute tilt of his mouth. The shiver that crawls up her spine is supernatural now. Utterly humorless. Even now, he says, and she does not turn over her shoulder to look where his gaze lands, because she feels the snow and the rain and the salt of the earth even without watching it.
She does not say a word about it.
Instead she moves closer to grief, to the inevitable crash-and-burn of their zenith. In a hundred years the earth will not remember them and yet it embraces them so tenderly - in the quiet crystal water and the watchful hugging of low branches overhead, in the way the world around them sings with silence, silver, sweetness.
What words would be useful, anyway?
She leans against him, nervous, stumbling, and forces the simmer of her skin to lower to a more human kind of heat. Well, says Bexley finally, her voice catching on the roughness of it. That sounds like you spitting out a prayer. I’m impressed -
And, godly, reverent, she keeps her visions to herself, falls into his arms though she can see how it ends, in death, in fire, in a body left alone, but for now they are both innocent and arrogant and when she feels his heartbeat against hers it is all she can think about.
