*✧ — all the things i do

The sky stretches its vastness over her warm head. The sun is gentle on her; its rays are a golden crown on her scalp, and there is a soft tingle under her skin as the specks of sweat push through the pores. She sits on the damp boards, and the residue of last night’s rain sticks to her skin. Her head is resting on her knees; knees hugged, fingers interlacing where hands meet. The wood is squishy beneath her heels.

He stands over her like a guardian. She doesn’t turn her head to face him; he’s quiet as a shadow, but she feels his heartbeat in his chest, rhythmically following his breaths.

He observes her, and contentment nestles between his lungs. He feels a lump sliding into his throat, and it settles there, but he doesn't swallow it—he lets it prick and burn, and squeeze his vessels into erupting.

—

He finds himself at her door almost every day when she isn’t away; it has become a routine for both of them. They exchange plans and news, discuss gossip and business, and he waits for the particular moment when I need to leave Riften escapes her mouth. She skips it, more often than she doesn't, and he takes it as a relief. He then waits for her to press her palms against his cheeks and kiss him, and he takes notice of how she usually doesn't bother moving his auburn strands to the side.

He lays her flat down on the bed and admires the way her skin's elasticity slightly pulls and tightens her face. If a tear fell out of her eye, it would inevitably get into her ear before he could stop it and kiss it away. He wonders if there would ever come a time when he would be deprived of her, a time when he would have to live off a memory of her endlessly eating itself away like a day's cycle. Maybe it would've been easier if she hadn't been so conveniently tucked and sewn into the flesh underneath his breast, because she would've been nothing but an occurrence in his life, as sporadic as the valleys and hills on the horizon.

He kisses her softly and sneaks a hand behind her head. She feels light in his arms, and she doesn't bite him or bruise him as she does sometimes, and he stops to savor the moment. He likes having her like that—surrendered to tranquility, taking up the form of a sleepy cat purring under a warm hand. She observes him from that position, and sometimes it seems to him as though her eyes see past him, or through him—as if there is an endless universe behind the thinness of his soul that he fails to see, but she laughs spontaneously, and it anchors him back to reality.

He trails his lips along her collarbones, and there lie soft moles scattered across otherwise perfect skin. He takes her breasts into his hands, then into his mouth, and her nipples harden like grazed pearls against his tongue. She shivers at the sensation, and he knows that there is wetness smeared on the thin skin between her thighs, so he imagines the slickness with which he would slide into her and remain nestled inside. It is so easy for him to give in to her warmth and surrender to the first pulse of her muscles, but she courses through him slowly, and pushes him even further, as if there is a stretch that he is yet to reach, a depth that he is yet to discover.

The magnificence, he thinks, of a woman.

—

He dreams of Mercer sometimes, and he curses himself for it with a dried-out crust of anger around his heart. Then, a soft whimper escapes her lips as she stretches in her sleep, and he becomes grateful for the knife to his back, for otherwise he would’ve remained clueless about the fact that he had one.

She had covered the scar up, as she said she would, but it lingers somewhere deep, under layers of tight skin, and he wonders if it ever hurts or itches, or if metal flashes through the flesh like lightning flashes through the sky. She propped herself up once and told him to close his eyes, before revealing the skin under the illusion, and as much as he did not expect the act, he spent hours mapping the scars, touching and kissing them, but nothing about it escaped her lips afterwards, so it was in the silence of his mind that he told himself stories of how they might’ve come to existence. He wondered, but never asked, if she memorized it—if she mapped out the body underneath her body, or if she had long forgotten the lines and textures that make it up.

—

She tells him that hands weren't made to embrace themselves, and takes him passionately into her arms, and his lip bursts when it crashes against hers, but he takes the burning sensation and the salty taste in, as if it's the most pleasant breath of fresh morning air. He pulls her by the throat so that he can see her face better, but a stray lock of hair falls across, and she laughs, loudly and genuinely, with pearly teeth and a shiver in her chest, and it makes him feel less like a dot in the endless universe. He sees a sun behind her eyes, a timeless star and an endless flame, and he clings to it, as if it's the sole source of his existence.

To live against her skin would never be enough, he thinks. He wants her to obliterate him, to consume him beyond his existence, and even then, he wouldn't get as close to her as his being craves. He wants her to suck out his bone marrow and spit it back into him, because he is endlessly alive alongside her. The thick walls of his heart would never stop pumping to the rhythm of her own. He has become an immortal man.