#eggwrites

November nights. A single lit lantern in the greenhouse, an empty glass at your elbow, plants around your feet. Your jacket hangs around you like a vice. There’s dirt in the air, dirt on your hands, dirt on his cuff but he doesn’t notice.There’s a single crease between his brow. It deepens when you grin.

aw that’s so kind 🥹🥹

Hugging a plushie while you

Do you think it's innate, or did they learn the script?

I've tried to learn the script, got bits here and there. Enough to get by, keep friends close and feel valued. I know the cues and what should be said.

But it's the nuance

You want to be supportive, or express a specific emotion or thought

But the words just fail

Have you ever had it where you have a thought, or a feeling

And it has a root and it grows and fleshes itself out into something complex and nuanced and well worded

And you go yo write it down or explain it and it just

Fades

Slips through my fingers like smoke

And it's so frustrating because I could be so eloquent so often but the words just won't come

Or I'm scared to speak up

Or interrupt

Or be myself and come across as unintentionally rude

So instead I'm just quiet

And in my silence, someone gets to the thought before I do, cracks the joke before I have a chance

And I do feel cheated

That should have been MY quip, remark, advice

And instead I fade into the background, my thoughts spilling inside my head but never out into the conversation

But I learned.

When I first met you, you snarled at me from the shadows. You were dark eyes and thorned words wrapped in shattered glass and steel cords. Blood poured down from your nose and from the knives clutched in your bruised hands. Yet like a moth pulled towards the flame, I was drawn to the defiance poured into every line of you. And, somehow, irrevocably, you were drawn to me too.

You taught me what it was like to be rain after a storm - lying wanting and exhausted in a puddle at your feet.

We stole hellfire kisses in trenches and ruined streets, amid choking smoke. I learned how to sear want into your skin with my mouth. How to feed hunger into your eyes, and bite at it from between your thighs. When your touch lanced lightning through my body, I kissed the thunder from your lips and learned how to make love to a storm.

We may not have been made of blood and fire, but fire and blood made us. So when the dust settled, when there were no bodies left but ours, you caught my gaze from across the battlefield and I despaired. Because how could flames stay alive with no fuel nor oxygen?

But you knew how to simmer instead of burn.

You dripped honey instead of poison from your lips for me and traded your serrated blades for cautious fingertips that made me ache for more. You branded kisses into my skin, bit at the hunger on my lips, and on rainy nights we were a hurricane. You held, never gripped. Asked, never expected. You gave, and gave, and gave, and gave, and slowly I remembered how to give in return.

I knew the weight and breadth of your voice so I learned how to listen to the silence and the noise between. I learned how to guide air back into your lungs with kisses on the nights the ghosts sucked the wind out of your lungs. I knew how to catch your hand when your fingers sought mine, and on rare occasions when my heart was light, I returned your smile just to watch yours grow brighter.