drowning never felt so much like flying as it does right now
Warmth upon her brow, a gentle caress in their little darkened corner now, only starlight a witness to the tender touch of lips upon her forehead. Does he hear the way her heart strains towards him, its harpsichord muscles plucking themselves raw until they are broken and bloody and waiting to try again and again and again? Can he hear the sigh of her chest as she leans forward, leans in so close that they might never come unglued from this moment or this spot? She doubts it even though she wishes she does not.
For a perfect moment she lets herself melt. How the phoenix is so good at melting now, melting into boys with pretty words and pretty eyes, melting into people like a candle dying, melting until she is but a puddle left to freeze over and reform into something different, something new. Oh, but how she softens for him and listens to his words, listens to the shallowness of her own panicked breaths, listens and wishes he would talk forever and a day.
Moira could get lose in his words, in the highs and the lows and the softness of it all. Michael is much like a kitten, a kitten too gentle for her, too sweet, and too lovely to let go of.
At last he withdraws, and sweet ancestors, he is radiant. Almost, it is almost painful for the phoenix to look upon the man of sun and starlight, to drink in all of his gold and his grandeur. But she looks because she knows it will be something that will stay with her for eternity. She looks even if it will blind her to everything else. She looks because she cannot look anywhere else but him, or the curve of his mouth, or the love in his eyes, or the tip of his ears.
She looks at him just as he looks at her: naked and completely undone.
"I wish to go to the ocean," she says at last, straightening herself and delicately clearing her throat. Dished head withdraws, pesky hairs flop back into disarray, and the crystal still safely hides within her hair. "I wish to walk over the black pearls and taste the salt and see the docks. I don't want to go home," she says, when really she means I don't want to leave you yet. "Will you come with me, Michael?" And she extends that hand again, the same one offered in such a different way outside a maze that their Queen razed to the ground.
Now she waits for him as she did not then, with bated breath and a quiet hope that keeps on burning; defiant through every storm that splinters all of her ships into reefs and coasts until there is only the hope of rebuilding left in the end.
