the blood on my teeth
begins to taste like a poem
begins to taste like a poem
T
he rose feels like it’s mocking him, as it waits for him on the door and stares at him like it knows something he doesn’t. Even as she turns to the door and pushes it open - without waiting for him, without smiling at him like she once had, leaving him to find his own way inside - the rose seems to be laughing. And the words of the waiter come unbidden to him then, You’ll not be wanting anything to do with her. Trust me.For the first time, he wonders if maybe the man had been right.
He knew better than to liken them to a fairy tale - they were each too rough, too sharp, too jaded to resemble the princes and princesses of the stories. So why did the flatness of her voice ring out like a blade against a whetstone, shattering the silence of the hallway like it was just as fragile as a sheet of glass?
He could almost hear the pieces of his own resolution falling in jagged slivers to the carpet floor. And for a moment he thinks bitterly about turning away from the door, of dropping the note she had left him on the threshold and returning to the darkness of the Scarab where he belonged. He knew it was what his brother would have wanted, had he known where Toulouse was tonight.
But instead he tucks the note deeper inside the pockets of his scarves, and follows her slowly into the room, clinging to the edge of it like a shadow. He follows her, because he is always following her and even while the rose is laughing silently at him, he's too selfish to let her go just yet. He pushes the rose-painted door shut behind him, and all at once the silence of the room feels stifling. For what feels like an eternity, neither of them move, neither of them speak. And the tension feels like a knife held to his throat, one he wants to lean against and laugh at until a line of blood breaks across his golden skin, but today he doesn’t dare.
Toulouse watches her, and he can feel his heart beating angrily inside of his chest. He wants to tug the braid from her hair, to peel back all the thin layers separating them from what should have been - in his mind - a celebrated reunion. He wants to answer her in the same monotonous voice she greeted him with, and he hopes selfishly that it cuts her as deep as it cut him. Toulouse wants to make her hurt the same way her blank stare makes him hurt, to let the fire of his rage burn her in her own room.
But he only comes forward slowly, cautiously, reaching for the familiar chalices waiting on the center table.
"So," he says, filling the silence she invited in. The room sounds like broken glass as he unstoppers the serving bottle. The drink is a dark red, darker than the rose painted on her door; Toulouse fills two glasses, perhaps a little bit too full, and holds one in the air to her.
"Did you have a good trip?"
He doesn’t ask where she went, or what she had seen, or why she had been away for so long. But the glass turning slowly in midair between them looks more like a challenge than an invitation, like an unspoken dare.
@Manon | "speaks" | notes: <3
