I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
He had thought they’d known each other better.
He wonders if it is the change in her, the teeth of the kelpie that makes her so cold - but no, no, she has always been slate, sharp and gray as the tip of her spear whose scar he still wears. It would be easier, to think it isn’t truly her that looks at him with those eyes, with that mouth that twists, with that laugh -
Asterion hates that laugh, and the line her mouth shapes afterward. It is tempting to focus on these things, to compare them to all the other expressions he’s seen her wear (and disappointment has been among them before; that is nothing new between them), instead of listening to what she says. But her words are barbs, and what else can he give her but his attention? He owes her so much.
The words strike him like stones, though he doesn’t flinch. Inwardly, though, they are driving him back to the sea; there is cold foam on his hocks, his knees, his chest and throat. Inwardly, he is being buried by I only assumed you were smart enough…
It is a good thing he doesn’t know how much of this is still ahead of him, how much heart he still has to be bruised, how much shame he must swallow like bile, because if he knew he might have gone back to the island. Back to that creation-dust world, watching things die and be reborn, waiting to be struck by a falling star, or swallowed up by a monster. Only a fool would go on, would smile sadly like he is smiling now, looking at her with his eyes dark like smooth wet stones pulled from the bottom of the river.
Forgive me. She’s taken the words he wanted to say, has turned them on him - and she must know what it will do to him, what it is doing; the knowing is there in her voice.
All he’d given her was an honest answer. He wishes it would have been the right one instead, the thing that would unlock her, soften her expression, pull them together like a mending thread. He wishes she would have asked what happened, instead of that accusation that posed as a question (what do you want?)
But if there is an answer to this, it’s clear he’ll have to find it on his own. And why should it be any different? It isn’t her responsibility. He has given her enough of those already.
Something in him says, stay and fight. But Asterion doesn’t know what he would be fighting for, and anyway he’s always been better at letting go, and there is not a battle with Marisol that he knows how to win.
And so he smiles a tight, terrible smile, as a thick fog rolls in from the sea. “That’s your misjudgment. I’ve never hidden my mistakes, not that you’d let me, anyway.” He pauses, touches his tongue to the back of his teeth. “But I was right, to believe in you.” Almost he says goodbye, but it would be too much, a bad joke. Instead he only nods, and turns away, and vanishes into the mist and the growing thunder of the surf, which contains all the feeling he doesn’t know how to express.
@
Asterion.
