All it takes is a touch to remind me that she does not know how to paint war on my skin and call it a kiss. I did not know I had been waiting for it, for the paint to feel like blood tossed across my cheekbones like dapples. But I find, as we lean into each other, that touches between us are somehow easier and harder than it had been to the horses in the war-camps.
I do not regret having the chance to learn it now. And had I been another girl, a unicorn like my sister, I might have treasured the discovery.
Instead I demand more of it, more discovery, more slick paint against my cheek, more weight pressed against my side to hold all the pieces of me that are starting to flay together. There had not been a please between us when we met in a storm. We were all thunder, all rain, all frothing waves streaking like wishes across the horizon, and I will not allow us to be gentle now.
I wish she had given me something other than a moon below my horn. It does not sit as easy as it might have once there. It shines too silver in the moonlight, too bright in the firelight, and it turns the gold of her into something pale and meek instead of furious. I speak just to catch a whisper of the thunder back into the cage of my heart. “I thought about you every time someone told me I needed to be tame.” My legs ache to run, and run, and run, until I am too fast for her wings to catch.
Someday I will.
Taking the brush from her grasp is so much easier than taking a sword from a ribcage. But for her I try to gentle it, because she is a doe and I am a wolf, and I do not want her to fear my teeth. “All you smell is me.” My correction is, perhaps, crueler than my touch had been when I took the paint from her. But I will not apologize for that either.
Because if I smell like the sea, like a bit of something else, I will have to conquer that world too so the only thing left is the taste and smell of me.
@Aster
