Steam like ribbons. Steam like lazy clouds that rise with the sun and fall with the moon. Steam that every second is growing thinner, cooler, until it is gone altogether. And Michael has not stopped staring at Bexley.
Michael's private sin is ruthlessness, not in the way someone might say that man is ruthless, and not in the way his father was ruthless, but in the way that moths are ruthless, or worms are ruthless in a way that nobody quite sees except in hindsight.
Michael likes to pry. Michael likes to crack people open and look at their fears and their hopes and their sadness. Michael likes to dig his dirty hands into the meat of them, and read their bones like a story he is not skilled enough to write. But not Bexley. Michael sees her, sees her naked pain and her thick pink scars and he does not wonder why.
She is smiling. He is still smiling back at her. Together they make a simulacrum of two things that are whole, two things that are not so very sad that their hearts feel like lead in their chest. Bexley says, because people tell me so, and Michael, after pausing for a moment to draw in a long breath, says "Fuck people."
His eyes finally stray from hers, across the street where she had stood before. "I like trouble," he says, with more gravity than it probably deserves, "but I've been alive a long time. Maybe 'everyone' lacks perspective."
Michael's private sin is ruthlessness, not in the way someone might say that man is ruthless, and not in the way his father was ruthless, but in the way that moths are ruthless, or worms are ruthless in a way that nobody quite sees except in hindsight.
Michael likes to pry. Michael likes to crack people open and look at their fears and their hopes and their sadness. Michael likes to dig his dirty hands into the meat of them, and read their bones like a story he is not skilled enough to write. But not Bexley. Michael sees her, sees her naked pain and her thick pink scars and he does not wonder why.
She is smiling. He is still smiling back at her. Together they make a simulacrum of two things that are whole, two things that are not so very sad that their hearts feel like lead in their chest. Bexley says, because people tell me so, and Michael, after pausing for a moment to draw in a long breath, says "Fuck people."
His eyes finally stray from hers, across the street where she had stood before. "I like trouble," he says, with more gravity than it probably deserves, "but I've been alive a long time. Maybe 'everyone' lacks perspective."
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
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