“And I could have written nothing else.” Her eyes look at him with darkness, oil slick spots over the green and each spot glistens with sorrow and stories and understanding. There are dark things in that gaze of hers and darker memories when the fires spark and hiss and she watches the darkness slip over him with something like kindness and like cruelty.
In that moment Isra isn't sure if it's dreams or sorrows or the knowing of dark things that rises up her soul and touches the air around him like a cat stretching in a first rays of daylight. Some part of her feels awake and another part shivers for the knowing of it. Strange is the mix of salt and stardust, sorrow and constellation.
Strange. She thinks as her thoughts run wild when their shoulders brush like silk sheets before letting the night slip between them again.
“Let there be no debts between us.” Words finally come to her and she catches them like fireflies between the drifting moon-dust of her thoughts. And perhaps a little of the whimsy of catching thoughts like wishes slips out in her voice and makes it toll like almost-laughter, almost-shyness, almost-song.
Really though she caught the words because she doesn't want to owe this man of star-light and blackness a thing. Isra thinks there is not a bone in her body strong enough to hold all the weight of him, all that sorrow and retrospection and dreaming wonder. They are dreamers she thinks, sorrowful and hopeful and when she watches the night go on around them like waves around stones she knows they should go around and around and around like storm-clouds.
They should never touch the ground.
“Will you let me show you the night?” The fire and moonlight catches on the ocean of her eyes and all the oil-slick darkness dissipates to glitz and dreams. Stories dance in her eyes, spots of fire-light that look like shapes dancing across the blue, twisting and turning. The light dances and ebbs as the bonfires dance between the wind.
Everything smells like silk and smoke and salt. And Isra dares him with her gaze to blink back his sorrow and eat of the air and forget for a little while that both them are more made of black, black, black than starlight.
ISRA WHO EATS THE AIR ;
with all your grief in my arms
