and i must pour forth a river of words
or i shall suffocate.
or i shall suffocate.
T
hat story is still shivering in the back of her mind, the one of a boy and a girl who looked into the mouth of a monster and laughed. The ones who wore smiles on their faces when they plunged into the darkness, and did not hesitate to drink from the deep waters they found waiting there for them. He knows the story — the beginning of it lives in his memory the same as it lives in her’s.
But what he does not know is the ending she created for it, long after they left the lakeside.
She abruptly shivers, and steps closer to the statue that stands like a sentry between the two of them. The light of its eyes falls like the moon across her notebook, as she flips hurriedly past the beginning pages and slows only as the pages turn neater, and crisper, and finally blank.
But Maret is not prepared for his admission.
Our lake, he had said. Not just any lake. Our’s.
The brass tip of her quill hovers just above the page, the end of it quivering in small circles like it simply cannot wait to tell the next story. But it never comes. Maret sets the quill down, and tilts her eyes slowly up, up, up from her leather-bound notebook, up until she is looking at Leonidas again. His antlers gleam in the firelight like magma twisted into the crown of a stag.
“You went looking for me?” she asks, and she does not feel quite so cold anymore. There is a wild thing inside of her, there always has been, with a belly full of fire to keep her warm. And even when the bits of ice creep tighter around her chest and limn the edges of her jewels with frost, she doesn’t feel it.
She wants to step closer, to trace the edge of her quill down his cheek and paint him in all the words she did not know how to say, only write. She wants to tell him how much like a deer he looks, both brave and shy, strong and soft, and how she had always thought bucks to be the kings of the forests.
But she only smiles, and closes her journal (as if to say the best story, and the best secrets, already lived between them.) “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” The statue is watching them, waiting, wondering, and Maret wonders how many secrets it’s been told, to make its eyes shine as brightly as they do. And she thinks it might already know all of her’s, even before the words reach her lips.
“But I’ll promise you this, Leonidas — next time you go back there, I’ll be there waiting.” It is not a secret, and this time she does not call him a lost boy —
but oh, it still makes her heart leap like all the best love stories do.
{ @Leonidas "speaks" notes: }
