"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
Michael shifts to give her space. "That's okay," he says. "You can be as sad as you want. We'll match."
If he were different, he would think she's beautiful. Bexley's lines are soft curves crashing into sharp angles, and each angle echoes something else. She has this look of completeness that he has never been able to master or even mimic.
Michael has always had this sense of lacking that he cannot shake. If he is a pit, if he is a yawning jaw sucking light from around him and turning it black and dirty, he is a pit with ineffable depth. It is in his body: the way he stands (as if trying to be small, to be safe, to be anything but what he is) or the way he smiles (warm, but tight, and almost too bright - he is hoping the light bounces off enough of his edges that it shines back at them from within, but it is always cold light, always sickly light) but especially in the way he laughs, like someone panicking.
Like someone hiding.
Here he is, with more things that he either can't or won't say - full to bursting.
"I don't blame them," he says, "--not that anyone deserves to be talked about, just that I imagine you make quite the impression. Speaking from entire minutes of experience."
Michael all but winks, raising the cup to smile against it, taking one long drink that leaves it drained and glistening. Its heat rolls down his throat and pools in his stomach but still he is so, so cold.
I don't think I've heard of you, Bexley says, but maybe that's better. Michael laughs like sunshine, laughs like thin clouds and sick green light - it is mirthless but he doesn't notice.
"No, you wouldn't have. My name's Michael, and I'm wildly unremarkable."
Then she is reaching for him, pressing her own pink muzzle against the blue of his scarf, blue like deep oceans and dragons and a place in him that he cannot go - he is caught between her warmth and his, the sleepy sun in opposition to his bleak sickle moon. "This," he says, almost too quietly, "is a gift."
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