♝: Reading a book together
He makes a pillow out of himself for her, mostly as an excuse to cling and hide, and he's all hard surfaces and sharp angles cozied up to soft curves but she doesn't seem to mind.
"Jewel and I come up from the field," she reads, "following the path in single file."
He listens absently, mind smoothing with the steady flow of words, strong soft serene voice slithering in silk and sweet and seeping-- everything settles and slows.
"Cash squints at the board. On the long flank of it the rain crashes steadily, myriad, fluctuant," she says, and she hesitates, maybe considering her audience, maybe wondering if she should explain the words, maybe thinking whether it'd be a waste of time. He doesn't care--
He just twitches his knuckles where they rest loose against her side. She just moves on. " 'I'm going to put it on a bevel,' he says."
He could count the dust motes caught low and lit yellow-pale in the lamplight. He could, if he could keep his eye open, but she's warm in all the places she allows his arm to curl around, soft on the shoulder where she lets him hide his face.
Half-asleep and drifting, still following the story somewhere in his mind, he opens his mouth--
he thinks at first it's him--
even as she reads it he says--
"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep," he says. He says, "And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.
"I don't know what I am," he says. "I don't know if I am or not."
[Quotes are from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.]