You look like a winter’s night. I could sleep inside the cold of you.
It’s hard to look directly at her. Eriadon finds himself always looking at the corner of her mouth or a random item just behind or over her head. Her adjacent. She was too everything. Too thin, too tall, too pale, too sharp, too ghastly. Too perfect. When he looked at her, he could only do so in her sleep, when she seemed more real. More within his reach. Even when she took him to bed he couldn’t face her, in denial even while trapped in the web of her body.
Her words make his breath stick to his throat, and he thinks maybe he really is dead this time. Like her words are spindly fingers, spreading his rib cage and snapping his sternum like the taut string of a violin. Wrapping their sticky grip around his heart and easing it out of his body, careful not to rip or tear their harvest.
He touches his own face, feels the sharpness of his bones and the hollow gouge of his cheeks. How did she see him when he failed to exist? Failed to live. He could never be as enthralling as a winter’s night, as deafening. She was like endless depth of powdery snow and he was nothing but a flurry melting before it hit her tongue.
“Don’t say that,” he whispers in the dark, eyes focusing on the flickering candle perched on the windowsill behind her head. “Don’t say that.”
