@inbalanceofpower: it was something. don’t say it wasn’t.
he takes her to italy a year down the line. a sort of an assignment, he calls it. something refreshing in the midst of their routine of sniffing out wolf packs and recruiting them to his cause. bloodier, too. she has developed a taste for it, he’s noticed. she’s learned to fear no death that is not her own. so he feeds it, revels in the excitement with which she picks their meals and the nonchalance with which she discards them once they have exhausted their use.
he takes her to florence first.
there, she learns that there is no better tour guide than someone who has seen these places being built, who’s touched the worn marble and sand and concrete time and time again. she also learns that he is never more insufferable than when he’s in a museum, commenting about everything, a snob in the worst way, endlessly annoyed at the tourists. it’s there that she begins to mistake his involuntary slips into familiarity for something more.
in rome, he tells her how he and rebekah wandered the war-torn states as cesare borgia ripped the country apart. how rebekah, family romantic that she is, took a fancy to the boy she modeled for, who had promised to immortalise her, to make her an object of reverence, a goddess in her own right.
she asks what happened to him. he tells her that he never finished the painting because they found him beaten and left in an alleyway, his beautiful face mangled and broken, that golden hair dampened dark with blood. he’s kept the truth hostage behind the grind of his jaw, but he’s sure that rebekah knows her brother’s hands, knows his touch better than anybody else. ‘thankfully,’ he adds. ‘the boy was mediocre at best.’
he suggests seeing the countryside next, with half of his face in shadow from the buildings around them. he looks tense—he always does; if there has been a moment when she’s touched him and his muscles haven’t been pulled taut, she doesn’t remember it—like there is something in his throat that wants to be let out and he can only do so before the vastness. she agrees; she’s let him guide her since the day she met him.
she finds it pretty. he scrunches up his nose uncharacteristically, says, ‘you can do better than that.’ to his eye, it’s a kaleidoscope of greens and burnt red-oranges mixed with various pops of violet and pink and poppy red of flowers. she lets him name them, and tell her of the places that no longer exist here and the people who stood in the place she now occupies.
it rains in milan. they spend the day in the hotel room, wrapped in sheets and drinking sugary alcohol from each other’s mouths. she watches him, a spectacle of dishevelment: mussed hair, the bulging vein on his throat, blood smeared on his mouth. she leans in to lick it clean. when he makes a sound over the patter of the rain, she thinks it sweeter than the tartufo he made her try in reggio.
venice is five days of reaching for him and finding flesh. it is harsh sunlight and his voracious laugh in her neck, his tired smile over a plate of crêpes at ten am, his arm around her waist. night, under the cover of dark stars and the quiet hush of the canal beneath their window, is the only time he allows himself a sort of softness. he watches her. watches the slope of her throat, the parting of her lips, her eyes flitting beneath her lids. he pushes back a strand of hair from her face, rests his hand on her throat. she does not stir.
in pisa, he kisses her like he wants to drink her until her veins are scrubbed clean, left useless in his wake because he cannot bear to be unneeded. she’d be lying if she said she hasn’t thought about it: is the good in him locked and safely tucked away, or has he left it there, like the open wound that it is, to fester and rot? is there anything more to the tick of his jaw, or does he wake up with death, and only death, on his mind?
when she gets tired of this, when her heartstrings have worn thin and snapped under the pull of his fingers, she decides to leave. he’s nonchalant. noncommittal. like he has lived this scenario before and knows how it ends: with her crawling back, tangled into his sheets, and when the fog has lifted from her vision, she’ll say it was a mistake. it enrages her—how he’s so quick to shrug off the meanings she’s attributed to every smile, every touch, every glance.
it was something. to her, maybe.
she’s rebuilding herself when he looks at her, sees him turn to stone, to steel, to salt. she can still taste him on her lips, the most cloying, unbearable sweetness.
‘humans find meaning where there is none to be found. what you feel now, i’ve felt and forgotten. you will, too.’ and you will find that the only warm hearts worth having are the ones still beating in your palm. ‘i’d advise you to strip yourself from any mortal notions. the cycle of heartbreak is vicious. and quite tedious, if i do say so myself.’
