bitch you gotta take it
For the first time in a long time, I am paying attention:
To the whorl of black hairs where they meet the splash of white on his chin, how they interlock like waves eating at the shore. To the sharp blue seaglass of his eyes, cold when they meet mine, but warming with every passing second. To the faint, coal-hot curve of his smile, the swath of black lashes, how his face has become one painterly swirl of black and white and gray and interrupted by lightning-strikes of blue.
For the first time in a long time, I am paying attention, because how can I not? We are so close that I can feel his body heat bleeding into the cool air, the crackling, skin-snapping surges of electricity. When I breathe in I feel like I can smell his anger. Or maybe I can just read it in everything else about him, in the tense hunch of his shoulders and the painfully harsh curve of his smile, something like a reaper’s scythe in the already dark planes of his face. It’s a disaster, but I can’t look away.
I am watching us crash. I am enjoying it far more than I should.
Andras leans in closer. Which I didn’t even think was possible. But when he does, I realize I was waiting for it, hungry for it; tense, then suddenly flood-relaxed, with the awkward pleasure of relief that comes when the string is cut and the distance between us folds, again, in half. I blink. My heart is soft and slow, near-dazed. When I breathe, it doesn’t feel quite right—stilted, gravelly, a marker that I am vulnerable.
I dare you, Andras says. And if I thought I was defenseless before, I was wrong. Now I am close to combustion. On the verge of trembling with tension, body stretched like a violin string, every muscle and tendon wound tighter than I thought was possible, and my gaze is burning-intense, and my mouth is desert-dry; I can’t breathe. Or don’t want to. The rush, when it comes in, will be too good to refuse.
When I inhale, I am expecting a shudder but hear a purr. (Gods, I impress myself sometimes.) It builds in me like a fire. I am exhaling plumes of smoke into the cold air, watching them dust Andras’ skin like frost on the short grass below us. He’s kissed me already; what else is there left to grab his attention with?
I roll my jaw in thought. Feel, then hear, a kind of click. Like something has come back into place.
I lean in, close enough to kiss him, with the heavy-lidded eyes and slack jaw of someone who is about to. And then with a firework-fast grin and in one nimble movement, I snatch the glasses from his nose and go bolting past him, my whole body a question mark, a dare.
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