#limpingconscience

        His gesture is innocent – she knows it to be meant as such – but even still, there is the inevitable moment.  The moment when the world shuddered around her, when her chest and throat tighten, locking around her lungs and expelling all breath from her, refusing to allow her the option of dragging any more into her.  The moment when her heart twists and sumersaults inside her ribcage like a bird seeking desperately, rabidly to escape a cage that is closing in around it.  The world shudders, quaking around her, and her body goes taut, and for that moment all she can think of is to turn, and run, her path to the door already plotted.  

         She does not know what he knows of her.  What he knows of her past, of who she truly is – who she WAS – or the trauma that she’d endured, or the horrors that she’d inflicted on herself and those around her.  She hasn’t asked and he hasn’t offered.  She couldn’t know, if he even knew whether she knew how to play, or if her love of his playing was simply an adoration and passion for the music itself.  

He didn’t deserve her because she was so beautiful, she was a being of light and noise, she was an aching brilliance that he wanted to find some way to preserve, and if she remained at his side for whatever reason, he feared she would be robbed of her beauty, of the life in her eyes, of the kindness she’d given him.

She could have delivered every cruelty possible to him the night they met. She could have told him his playing was terrible. She could have hurt in in every imaginable way, but she hadn’t.

Petra had been nothing but kind to him, and he was the dodder vine, a strangling thing, green and black and twisted with the malaise that seeped from his bones, from his blood, from whatever was left of his spirit.

He said no the first time she kissed him but she had been so tender and he wasstarving. Her hands were gentle and she touched his neck, his chest, his hands, and she didn’t seem to mind just how very frail he was.

She could have killed him, right then and there in his office, but she’d done nothing but kiss him with immense urgency.

It was upon his suggestion that they go somewhere private, because, if this was indeed something she wanted – something he wanted, who was he to deserve this beautiful girl, he was nothing, he was a blip of black in the color of her world – he would fulfill her request.

For some reason, she found him worthy of being desired and he was a creature born of sin. Greed, oh vicious greed, the hunger that roared in his veins when her fingers slipped between the buttons of his shirt was unparalleled and he had no trace of purity left in him.

But for her, he would be kind; for her, he would pray, and he swore he saw monstrous forms of angels when she kissed him and his tongue broke the seam of her mouth in his desperation to taste her.

His fingers shook and he couldn’t find the correct way to slide the card, but somewhere in the midst of his graceless fumbling, he said a silent prayer to his neighbors, the girls whose names he had forgotten, the two girls who were twins or doppelgangers or best friends who showed him what it meant to be loved.

They were angels, they were sirens, but without them, he wouldn’t know what to do now.

She was tugging him forward and he slammed the door closed with his heel.

“Nothing, beautiful girl, nothing at all,” he said, gripping her fingers, if only to lean down and press a kiss to her knuckles, her forearm, the material of her shirt, her neck.

“Beautiful girl, beautiful girl…beautiful Petra…” on and on, reverence against her skin, the scent of her hair.

@limpingconscience  

         His words were as intoxicating as the alcohol that she had consumed in plenty at his club, words that she had heard plenty enough in her life, but in comparison now all those times before seemed so weak, so disingenuous.  There was such an earnest tone to his words, as his lips pressed to hers, to her cheek and jaw, and throat, to her fingers and wrist and shoulder.  He was arduous in a way that she could not understand, if she was being truthful.  She was not modest enough to deny the obvious, she was attractive, she held all of the standard marks of beauty and then some, and adding to that at times her supposed naivety, the way she could appear childish and innocent – if that was the game – and it was rare to find a man (or woman) that she could not seduce, if she truly wanted to.  

         Arrogance, perhaps, but was it arrogance if it was truth?  And yet, with him, with Oswald… she did not have to… try.  She did not have to be anything.  She was simply who she was, what life had made her to be and still, his words rang, hushed and hallowed, in her ears.  "Shhhh, shh,“ she crooned, one hand darting to curl around his neck, her thumb catching his jaw, tucking over the edge of his chin to be able to draw him closer, to press her lips hungrily to his, to let her tongue delve and dance between his lips to catch his own and twist against the length of it.  Her body curled into his even as her other hand wandered along his side, scraping lightly over his waist, inching up his back to pull him into her.  

✉ 2 A.M TEXT: Whatever you do, please, do not fret when you see me. This happens often, especially when I am not careful. Rest assured the man that delivered a black eye on my person will suffer for it.