summary; franco has trouble parsing how ewa makes him feel.
There's a cruel irony in the way she traces his skin. He felt bare, each and every imperfection on full display for her to memorize, to compose who he was in her own mind. He loves when she touches him. He hates when she feels him.
He hopes that whoever it is that she's made is a better man than him.
He's filled with a sense of shame and anger, and suddenly he wants to cry. For what reason, he can't exactly pinpoint. He pulls himself together, but through the cracks pours an eternal insecurity that is rooted so deeply within him that he fears uprooting it may just take all he is along with it. Her touch moves to his hands, each finger measured against her own until finally they intertwine, and he thinks that the sound of her voice saying his name won't ever leave his mind.
He almost fears for the delicacy of her, so close to the sharp edges of his that were chipped away over time against the soft, fragile spirit that shaped her, but if she was ever afraid, she never once showed it. He thinks for a moment that maybe she truly does care for him. Then, in an instant, humility and guilt and fear and longing altogether pool in the pit of his stomach. He does not understand quite how to parse one emotion from the other, only that it was everything he'd been raised to feel, but instead of the stinging force with which it was pushed, beaten, and carved into him as a child…now it was of his own doing; He shifts uncomfortably, unsure. He bites his tongue, he knows better at this point, but a million ways to ruin whatever this was — to ruin her — and to save his ego come close to spilling anyways. Another caress, this time along his shoulders. Again, he threatens to crumble.
He's been built and broken so many times, taken apart and reconstructed in his own fantasies of someone that his father always wanted him to be. And yet, for as many times as he'd fallen apart, not once did she ever force his pieces back together into the shape of someone that he simply wasn't. A voice he doesn't recognize in the back of his mind screams, hoarse and desperate. If she loves him now, maybe she could love him when he isn't so fractured, too. He is suddenly very aware of how close she is, how close she chooses to be, to him. He wishes that he could offer the same sort of intimacy. But it simply isn't who he is.
Fingers prod at her hips, fabric bunching within them as the heat of his breath hits her ear. She shudders, but not out of discomfort. She's since gotten used to the physicality he's prone to. She knows that it's as soft as he was willing to be.
He breathes a hundred different affections, a hundred different endearments, some of which she can't even understand, his babbling intermixed with vulgarities that she doesn't quite catch. Her fingers clasp at the back of his neck, cradling him to her.
She must pity him terribly.
The thought itself tenses his muscles. What a cruel fucking joke. He recounts his earlier musings, and the voice that he couldn't place melts into something far more familiar. It's mocking. Laughing. Laughing at him. A wave of nausea washes over him. His stomach lurches and he pulls away from her. How fucking stupid could he be? What kind of fucking fool did she take him for? If it were anyone else, by now he would have —
She presses a kiss to his lips.
"You're overthinking it again."
By now, he would have shoved them off of his lap. He would have put his gun to their head and proved his worth. But this wasn't anyone else. It was her.
Her, with hands that beckon and a voice that never raises, with a spirit of hope and a belief in the goodness of people, and eyes that saw further than just appearance and still never judge, not even him. Not even when she should. She is everything he is not.
She calmed him when nobody else could, and he'd rather not admit to himself or anyone else if he let her because her figure was enough of a distraction, or if it was because somewhere within him felt that for the first time in his life, he was seen as more than just a series of misfortunes and mistakes, an accident half shaped by his father, and entirely by a mother he never had. She took him in and cared for him when nobody else would. She loved him when nobody else dared to try.
His chest tightens. It was easier to bury the things that he disliked in the ground than it was to do so within himself. He chokes on his pride as it dares to try and tear it's way from his throat, and it is suffocating. But it was an agony that he would willingly bear if it meant a moment more with her, in all her doting perfection.
There had never been someone like Ewaline, and he would venture to say that there never again would be.
But there didn't need to be, because she was already his.
