this year I devour.
When he pulls at that strand of dark hair and sees how she flinches—how she melts under the tense and certain dare inside of it—something inside him gets hungrier and hungrier. It foams at the mouth. It gnashes its bright teeth, which up close look much more like fangs. (Much more like Elchanan’s.) He feels a little sick suddenly, dizzied by the want that washes over him: the want to kiss her,
to touch her,
and the deeper, darker desire to sink his teeth into the beautiful, satin-soft curve of her throat and pull, and pull, and pull.
The smell of blood fills his nostrils. The taste of it floods into his mouth. He is trying not to look at anything but her face, trying desperately not to be distracted by the way he can feel her little prey-animal heartbeat stirring under her skin, trying not to pay attention to the unbearably constant knowledge that he could—could just, so easily—
Elchanan bites his lip hard. Swallows thickly. Presses his nose to the slope of her dark shoulder and breathes in, breathes out, letting the movement of it stir the fine hairs of her coat as he tries to focus on something (anything) but the ache that is building and building and building in his jaw, sore as a toothache, deadlier than a broken leg. It throbs with a heartbeat of its own, a movement like the flapping of wings. It pulses until it overwhelms him, leaving his real, actual heart nothing but a shadow in the cavern of his chest.
“Should is useless,” Elchanan murmurs, and he means it. His voice is soft, but the word is emphatic; and his eyes glitter like stars in the dark when he gently tilts her head back to meet her gaze more evenly. “Do only what you would. What you want. And if what you want is not to be hurt...” A thread of magic again, like Rumpelstiltskin unspooling his neverending golden thread. “…then I can help.”
It is a promise, sweet and simple as that—but something underneath it is almost like a threat, something with a sharper edge, filled with a wanting that never ends. It is the sound of his heart. The sound of his breathing, dry and labored in the cold. The sound of the effort it takes for him to swallow, suck the salt from his teeth. Push down the swelling taste of vinegar and the want of moonlight and blood.
