on most days she makes him tick. slow and steady like a time bomb. the cascade of blonde across his pillows, the deep flush to her skin when he’s got her pinned to his mattress and their skin sticks together like warm honey. the chimes of her laughter, soft in his ear and the playful glint in her eyes that he thinks he gets off on making disappear. she builds up like pressure in his chest, weighing down on his heart and compressing his lungs until he thinks he’s going to snap.
and it shouldn’t make him angry, but it does. his emotional reaction to her is violent on most days, crashing against the inside of his rib cage like a sledgehammer. he wants to devour her, consume every inch of her until the only word she knows is his name and she’s so breathless that she can’t even say it.
his fingers wrapped around her wrists - it’s shit like that, how both her hands fit in just one of his, that makes him want to blow his brains out - grip tighter than they need to, fingers digging into her skin until white blooms beneath his grasp. his thumb at her jaw traces the soft flesh beneath her chin so gently it surprises him. he is ready to explode, to break into a million pieces of ripped flesh and jagged bone.
she does this to him. and it shouldn’t make him angry, but it does.
his face is grim as he takes her in, the daring grin and the way that she doesn’t fight against how he’s got her pressed into the sheets. that alone makes makes red bleed into his peripheral. he leans down, presses his forehead to hers and closes his eyes. he can’t think with her all around him like this. he’s got her wrists in his grip and his fingers threatening at her throat, but still she’s suffocating him. still, he breathes in slow like he’s trying to focus.
“don’t play games you can’t win, chlo.” he says, but he’s already lost.
“get out.”
he should be terrified, he should. of that fire in her eyes, the white hot heat behind her teeth that makes her words melt right through his skin and burn straight to the bone, that makes something close to regret settle in the hollow of his gut like boiling acid. he should be terrified of the steel in her tone, the finality that she regards him with.
they’ve been here before, his toes on the wrong side of another line. strike ten, eleven, twelve. he’s lost count, but he sees the recollection in the sheen of her unshed tears, in the slight shake of her hands that reminds him less of the way she grips white knuckled and desperate at his bed sheets and more of the way his own muscles tremble with blind rage when she’s blaming him for things he can’t say he hasn’t done.
he should be terrified. he really, really should. that this time it’s for real, that this time there are no words he can string together and throw into the night sky to make it all go away, that no matter how softly he drags the tips of his fingers down the silk slope of her shoulder or presses his lips to the curve of her neck with silent words he can’t bare to say aloud, she won’t cave again. that this time he’ll leave and she won’t let him come back.
is she testing him? he stumbles over it in his silence, in the stillness that has settled between them. the inches that feel like miles and miles and miles of aching distance. he should do something. say something.
his tongue swipes along his lower lip, he nods.
he should be terrified, but he’s not. not of this, not of her. of something else, maybe. of the idea of being terrified, of the prospect that she could make him feel something like that, something like fear? yeah. and that makes him a coward. and that makes him angry. so he steps back and he turns away. and he leaves.
because he should be terrified, but there isn’t enough room outside of the petrifying realization that he could be, might be, probably will be tomorrow when it all passes and she won’t answer his calls. and he isn’t sure what to do with it.
