for numberthree.

[obediences]

And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.

Comments

[numberthree]

She shouldn't have the right to this. The way Luther's voice goes a pitch lower hitching her stomach into an unexpectedly tighter coil, as his mouth starts to smile. Less shock and something more. Something she doesn't have a word for. But she's not sure she wants to worry about words.

Not when Luther's fingers are tightening further on hers, and he's pulling her closer, and her heart has the sputtering second of seeing it coming this time. Not just her throwing herself forward. Amused. Exhausted. Every nerve screaming. Done with waiting another second. Not even the ones for thinking first. Crashing into him like the air crashed back into her. Like a wave returning to the ocean.

This isn't that. This feels like. Like every second is strung all delicately on a line. The soft tug of his hand. The step that brings her closer to him. The step that brings him closer to her. The soft leather that finds her cheek now, too, for the second time. Fingers at the side of her face, across her cheek and her jaw, and there's a whisper of her that wants to lean into it and close her eyes --

(the only place she's ever known how to breathe;
how to lay down her grief and her shame;
how to scream out all her fire;


and still, be accepted)

-- but it's the tiniest shred beside the bonfire starting to catch under her breastbone, and the way her eyes can't close, can't look away. Because Luther is leaning toward her. Luther is going to kiss her. Which is different. Even if he kissed her back earlier. Shocked stillness and then apocalyptic shifting. But this isn't that. This is still, and quiet, and slow in the silent darkness of this broken house.

The touch of his lips and how she can't quite place when her other hand found the flat of his chest, or she pushed up on her toes. Only that the whole world flattens out again, entirely, against the texture of his lips, on his fingers in her hand, on her cheek. When this should have been the first kiss. Theirs, and of her entire life, but she doesn't care. She doesn't care that she's been waiting every second of her entire life for this moment.

Because it's happening right now, as her eyes close,
and her fingers ball into his shiny jacket, pulling him closer.