A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Now that he has caught those eyes, has made himself brave enough to meet them, Abel cannot look away.
He holds that fathomless heartbreak blue (the sky in the morning at the edge of spring, as his father finds one more worthless, beautiful shell) and watches each shadow move there. They are staring at one another and it doesn’t matter, because they are the only things in the desert, because before her is is as bare as a ribcage split open to the endless sun.
She steps back and he wants to cry out. But the boy stands as mute as ever, though his legs tremble with the urge to move toward her, to keep that same space between them where he feels seen, each stripe of shadow and bar of light. In a handful of moments he has fallen in love with her; he is not the kind of man who will ever realize it is only another betrayal of his traitorous heart, grasping to be understood. There is a part of him that loves Raum, too.
Her gaze moves from his and he feels like he falling, he feels speared on a shaft of sunlight. He feels like a hymn half unsung, suspended, waiting for a voice to finish him.
When she leaves forward his eyes close, and the warmth between them is nothing like the heat of the desert. She is only there for the space of a breath but Abel is busy at work, memorizing the scent of her, the shine of light through her glass-blue horn, the flutter of her pulse below her jaw, the color of her skin a dozen shades he has no name for.
And then she is going, opening up daylight between them like pulling seams apart, and he remembers how greedy he is, how selfish. Stay, urges his tongue, Keep her, cries his heart, but he closes a fist on his heart and swallows down the words. They stick in his throat like salt and sand and at first all he can do is nod. But his silver eyes still speak, crying out like a dying star.
“I promise, Sabine.” It is terribly easy to say - it is terribly selfish, the way he can’t resist shaping her name one more time, that bright bird singing off his tongue - it is terrible to watch her go and remember the desert rising savage around him, hot and hard and hungry.
He is too weak to watch her go and not follow, and he cannot follow. Maybe he belongs in the desert after all, for the way his heart is like a carved arroyo: withered and bursting and empty again in the space of one hard rain.
Abel turns away, toward the city that already smells to him like burning.
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