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It wasn't supposed to happen.
You stand at the top of a nameless mountain, states east away from your mistake, and you let the whirling clouds cool the leftover heat sizzling over your skin. Drops of the purest rain slide down your face and moisten lips that still feel like they're burning with acid need. A rare electric flash slices the dark wind and you see...nothing. Everything is inside, a slideshow, a kaleidoscope of moments playing on the widescreen of your mind; horror, laughter, pain, joy, all wrapped in a dizzying swirl of time.
It never should have happened.
You've always compartmentalized, tried to keep the pieces of your life in tidy little boxes where they wouldn't, couldn't, contaminate each other or degrade but, ultimately, you've always failed. They, humans, confound you, changing even as you reach out to hold them, leaving you grasping at shards of dreams that slice sharper than any knife.
He's the worst, has always sliced the deepest.
You know what he is, you've seen what he's done, but still it wasn't enough to make you stop and walk away. So angry, you held his life in your hands, and you tried so hard, but you couldn't close your fists to cut short the mocking words. He choked out so many secrets, yours and his, held your failures up too high to ignore, and the mirror of pain between you held two faces reflecting each other.
And then he told you why.
Human, yet not, he tasted of shame and regret, his lips bittersweet beneath yours. His hunger was no greater than yours, both of you equally bent on consuming each other down to the bone. You remember the colors under your fingertips, each bloom of blue-purple welcomed by a hiss of thanks and a plea for more, an abuse of strength, a loss of control bounded by years of restraint. It didn't matter; nothing mattered except the pressure that kept building at the base of your spine until wet heat washed your belly and his, until you couldn't tell where he started and you ended...only that you were.
And then you ran.
His bed was wide and soft and you fit in next to him as if you'd always belonged there. You laid there listening to him breathe, unable to shut off your brain, always thinking, rearranging the contents of boxes upended and dumped out on the floor, stirred into a mass, a morass, of bad assumptions. Impossible to ignore the past...yet...unwilling to relinquish the faintest hope, a future constructed of something more than gossamer wishes. Indecision forced you away, each step, each mile of distance separating you from temptation until you stand on a mountain, states east from your mistake, and face the whirlwind.
Sunrise.
Even through the rain, the sun calls to you, its bright promise the constant that sustains you when nothing else does. The rain and the sun together speak of renewal, seasons, the fundamentals behind change, and you find your strength of will that was never lost, just momentarily displaced. It's enough to make you move again, to re-enter night. He's warm ivory under faint light, shoulder bare, fist clenched as if to hold tight to his dreams and never let them go.
You wonder if you are his dream.
A sleepy question and an open palm call you closer, a muttered protest at your absence warming, evaporating the remnants of rain-cold doubts. You pull off clothes that carry mountain air, the damp of mile-high clouds, and you crawl inside the future praying he'll never taste the salt of your hesitation.
You choose hope.