The
sunburned hands I used to hold.
When she stirred, gasped in her sleep, fitful in her
dreams, he thought about all of the times he had laid beneath her, just like
this, feeling the too slight weight of her pressing down on him. He pinched the
curl he was playing with between his broad fingers and released it. The blue
black strands snapped tight around his wrist and clung.
As he drifted towards sleep, soothed her with his
hand up and down her back, he remembered. Their first date and the way the rain
on her cheeks had looked like tears. The first moment their mouths had met. How
shy her lips had been. The whispered shush of two bodies fumbling in the dark.
And how he had stroked her, just like this, after their first time together.
She’s been so afraid that her father would find out.
And then, their senior year, there’d been the baby, until the baby was gone.
They’d fought and they’d made-up. They’d had each other and through it all,
they’d loved.
And just like this he’d held her until she’d left
him. Gone to school and he couldn’t follow. She’d come back, every now and then,
but she’d never come home.
Not even when the Wicked started imposing sanctions
and the humans weren’t allowed to attend any schools passed the twelfth grade.
He’d wanted to hold her, still felt her in his blood like a fever but by then she
wouldn’t let him. She’d told him that she was different now. That school had
changed her. That she wasn’t in high school anymore.
But then three months ago he’d found her on his
doorstep. He’d looked into her beautiful brown eyes swimming with tears,
listened to her tell how her father had been taken in the latest round of
arrests. She had needed him to hold her again.
So he had put his newly rebuilt life on hold and he
had let her back in. And he’d watched, helpless, as day by day she’d faded a
little more. Until now she was just a black and blue shadow haunting his
bedroom.
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