T E N E B R A E
On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells
and in my heart: all Hells
Do you love me? The monk asked Elena.
He does not hurt as she looks away. At least, not as badly as he might have feared. He sees the way she twinges, as if bitten. Her answer was not so simple.
You know the answer .
She does not say she loves him back. Yet he does not stir with distress. Tenebrae does not pull himself away from where his body is pressed to Elena’s. Rejection does not burn him.
He knows the answer. It is written across her face. It is in the need of their shared kisses.
If anything, a mixture of relief and delight mixes with his rising guilt, and slips, serpentine through his veins. To not hear it is to hope that maybe she doesn’t - that it is only him. It is easier then, to return to the monastery a jilted man than one to turn away from a lover. Yet he does not think her silence is born of her lack of love. Dread and delight war within him as Elena trembles against his body. She holds in their love, as if it is a secret. He can see it, how it twists within her.
Her pain, her reluctance speaks to something within him that is echoing, shattering out. Elena and Boudika have changed him irrevocably. The golden girl beside him keeps her reply hidden behind her lips, her teeth, her tongue. But she is right. Tenebrae does know her answer.
Tenebrae sighs softly. He drinks in the satin of her skin. His lips trailing a path of fire and shadow along her cheek. It is an innocent gesture, so much less heated than their shared kisses. Kisses that still ghost his mouth. “It’s okay.” He breathes against her gold-leaf cheek, as the moon frees herself from the clouds, “I am not ready to hear it yet either.” To not hear her say she loves him is some kind of sweet relief, like rain after a storm. Yet Tenebrae is filled up with guilt and it weighs upon her, upon him.
She says he has taken from her, enough. He laughs low, low, low whispers that tickle along the gold threads of her hair. “As you have from me. I am scared of how you have changed me with your taking.” He does not kiss her, not any more. Not when he is still drunk on all the kisses that have come before. “Will you stay with me? It is peaceful here and you are alive. I do not wish to return home yet.” And then lower, words pressed into the curve of her ear, “Stay with me.”
And he will stay with her until the dawn chorus comes and the day splits their embrace with sunlight.
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