she sits there folded into his arms like she’s trying to braid their existence together, stretches out her neck to give him more to take. call him conqueror, call him king, her body has been taught into pale gold and she wants to hand it off to him piece by piece. their kisses are breathless and deep and shallow, intimate and innocent, and haera can feel her lips growing plump from the sudden use. she feels the rest of her expanding also. there’s a white-flame heat licking over her bones, passing from one limb to the next as she tightropes between shyness and righteousness.
she’s grateful for the removal of his gloves not because they scratch, but because she’s been waiting for the wholeness of his palms on her for minutes that feel like (that are) years. kirin’s hands take to her thighs and exhales a sudden sweet sound into his mouth, and when he pauses she too settles, seafoam following the lead of the wave. i am content, she is saying as she breaths spine-deep, to live as we are now. to forge a frame around this moment and let it breath on as if never-ending. she cannot stop looking at him, gripping the sculpt of his face with her glance, and something burns her: desire, anticipation, regret, love. she doesn’t know yet. she only burns and fogs up the glass between them with her warm breath.
it’s the slightness of her wrist against his shirt that peels it back at first, unintentionally half exposing the deep plum of bruised flesh. haera’s attention is finally stolen from his beauty to his pain, and in a tender-long moment she says nothing but reveals the rest of the bloom by pulling at the damaged collar of his shirt. what she sees is deep, dark. her fingers treat it with a careful cosset, an outline of its shape before brushing over its entirely - then, after more breaths, come her lips. down, down, down.
she finds the next, pulls the collar of his shirt down in gentle investigation, eyes its size and mouths at the pit below his collarbone.
she is stuffing flowers in the barrels of guns.
she unravels him, and he wants to sink somewhere farther. he’s ugly, malformed, bones broken and healed in the wrong way, and soul cultivated in the dark shadows of locked rooms and by the edge of a knife. they’ve marked him as theirs with scattered scars and angry bruises, in places where buyers won’t be dissuaded at first glance. his shoulders hunch, almost by instinct, and his hands stop and he pulls away to let her see how undesirable his young body is: all skin and muscle, stretched taut over bones that feel too big to house such a tiny heart. he hardly breathes, but it feels like he is when she kisses.
( he thinks it’s about time for him to burn from the inside. ).
kirin doesn’t remember if she’s seen them before, or seen so much. his fingers move on their own, behind her back, settling on her shoulders, pulling back cloth just a little shyly, and more than a little cautious. his hands are still too rough, and he lets out another breath, “is this okay?” is it okay to want? am i any different? – perhaps he isn’t. he’s seen how others have looked at her, how she beguiles them with a gaze, and doesn’t know what’s happened between her and those she’s allowed to get this close, if she has. he doesn’t forget where and who they are, but perhaps it’s too late to back away now for fear that they’ll go too far.
he stops, nevertheless, and rests his forehead at the crook of her neck, and his palms return to her thighs and lift the cloth ever higher, as the rising blood under his scar-marbled skin. kirin never looks anywhere else but at her, and her alone; he’s memorised this room, but they are different people, and entirely new. “do you want us to stop?”
