“My body aches like an after-kiss breaking in soft fires and wildflowers”
He touches her.
Isra shatters.
The bits of her crack like glass or perhaps it's more like the moon cracking through a cloud or a low and weighty fog. Either way she is breaking and she knows it's not light that pours from the labyrinth of her soul (it's not her mind, he's deeper than that) but bits of oil and darkness and blood. And when there is no more blackness the sea pours out and the salt touches the blood and Isra in the now quivers for the sting of it and remembers how to drink of the brine and down.
She doesn't feel cold and for a moment she cannot even feel his lips across her shoulders. Isra feels only the kiss of his heat, the way he slips slowly down her flesh like the first gentle stroke of a switch before the lash, before the pain. Now when she trembles it's the marrow of her bones, tainted by the soul, that shift like stones under the tide and wipe away any sculpture the shore might have treasured.
Their chests press together, the tender and mortal flesh that holds their hearts and might shred with the mere kiss of a blade. Isra molds to him, fits all the soft roundness of this body that hardly belongs to her to his desert skin. She almost sobs to think that sea sand and desert sand are both a little salted, a little coarse, a little desperate to be made into glass, to be molded by the wind and weather and time.
What would time make of them when the day comes, when the snow starts to melt and the bison disperse like dandelion wishes?
Isra's spine feels like silk beneath him and the ice on her back melts and forms hot-springs in all the creases of her before it flows down like slats of her side like tropical falls.
And though they are fitted together, soot to snow, freckles to scales like a puzzle that has only just realized it was only pieces waiting to be found, Isra is still shattering. The oil and sea and blood are still dripping out between the slivers of her. Flashes leak out: of golden skin dressed only in chain, of looming faces that seem to be looking down and dripping violence like flowers drip seeds, of lash and whip and stories told to slip away, away, away just for one night.
Her hip feels golden again when he kisses it and for a a moment she forget what skin (is it even skin anymore or a nebula of dust?) holds all those broken bits of her into something that might look like form. A flake of snow melts from her horn and drips into the corner of her eye like a tear and Isra remembers. Oh she remembers!
“I am,” Her lips whisper against his rib-cage and she hopes that his heart might feel the way her lips vibrate like hummingbird wings and glass. Or at least that his soul might feel something of the truth of her.“not myself.”
It's her soul that cries and reaches out to his with something like roots and something like bared wire. Isra. Her soul cries out her name, the only true part of her, and she blows it his way like ivy seedlings and prays that her roots will find soil deep in the fire-sand of him.
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