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The world is ending.
Or, his world is ending.
It started the day he met Serena Langford, and has continued rampant ruin from that very moment.
There is no way to explain to her (even as someone who understands him like she walks around his head) that this thing is terminal . That she is it for him. There is nothing else after her. She is his personal second coming. His ragnarok. His seventh sun of seven suns.
Consequently, he doesn’t try and If she’s a mind reader, it doesn’t show. She blinks up at him, alight from the silvery moon streaming into her apartment through the glass. It should be lamplight but luckily it’s the moon instead.
When her tongue slides out to stroke across an errant freckle on his chest, he can only ease her up and up and onto him because if he is to die
(and that’s what it feels like),
he wants it here, he wants it where he is most at home, he wants it at her hand and at the joining of her thighs.
Noises.
She is noisy . Loud.
(When he’d been a boy and more or less devout, he’d understood the particular ecclesiastic meaning of the word ecstasy . The specific, fervent, transcendent experience. It was not a word to sigh over a particularly good bite of food or when sliding into a hot bath.
He didn’t believe it a whit. But there had been days when he almost wished he had because he could not imagine the express goodness for which mankind had been moved to invention to describe it.
Well, he hadn’t been able to imagine it. Not before.
Those temporary, base, bodily pleasures did not mean the same thing as an experience that made grown men weep because they were so thoroughly moved by belief and faith. Not that he had ever been so moved by belief or faith. Certainly never to tears.)
But she moves and—
( Dear God , he says and there are still days when he doesn’t know if it's colloquial, or if it's an address or a plea and what does it mean when there is nothing after, when his mouth has simply fallen open, when every part of his body is taut and silent?)
She moves and there’s that look on her face, the one that screams out from paintings. She’s tilted toward the moonbeam, her eyes closed and there it is, probably, if she feels even a fraction of what he does in this moment.
(Dear God , she looks beautiful in moonlight. In any light. Snuff out all the world’s light and it would still be true and maybe he should close that thought with an amen. )
More noises and not just her mouth. He can hear himself, murmuring but he doesn’t know what, not even as he speaks. A cacophony of skin against skin as he lifts her up and brings her back down again and again and again. Her shuddering ah ah ah.
She leans forward, sweating, and braces her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes. He knows it used to terrify her to meet his eye. Here. Nowhere else, but certainly here.
She’s not terrified anymore but perhaps...perhaps he is.
(When he’d been a boy and more or less devout, he’d understood the particular ecclesiastic meaning of the word awesome .
This was not something that you said in response to someone confirming coffee plans. This was not something to be said about a new song one enjoyed.
These things did not inspire an awe so great, that it made fear drip tension into the back of his jaw. That admiration sung his blood. These things did not overwhelm the mind.)
She is awesome though.
She is no longer afraid to look him in the eye.
(Which is why he maybe should be afraid because perhaps...perhaps she knows that she is the earth and everything in it.)
She doesn’t stop, not even as her hips slow, not even as she draws in tighter to him, panting and sweating and swearing, lip between her teeth. He says something— my turn —and they go over and she parts even more for him. He goes back to the place where she is pink and lush and swollen for him.
She still doesn’t look away.
Yes, he was, naturally, correct. His shoulders, his body have blotted out the light and it's just her in the darkness and he was right , still beautiful and awesome and divine .
(It is not metaphor.)
More sounds. She’s wetter now, she’s closer now, and he is too. This is ancient. This makes sense, with her. More noises and his ego explodes: she could bring him to his knees. She could burn him to ash. But he can make her whimper .
(He was meant to have an effigy, in his death. His face, his body, his sword, carved in stone for an eternity. Remember me , it would have begged.
He doesn’t care about being remembered.)
He wants—
He wants to enjoy this.
He wants—
He wants now .
He wants to be held.
Out loud. He must have said it out loud because her arms slide around him, tight tight tight, until there is nowhere to go but down in them to meet her mouth with his own. It's like that as he gives her everything he has, until he feels her trembling calm to nothing.
(People say it jokingly. He knows that. The little death.)
But if this is death and if it is necessary, let them carve the effigy of his heart in this moment. Preserve the look of blood and sinew that comes with utter contentment. Of the feeling of her hand on his cheek. Of the way it races, still, when she looks at him with sweet, heavy-lidded eyes.
She smiles.
And—oh.
It’s like an aching muscle, prodded. He’s been using it all the while (every day, every minute, every chance she’ll let him say it) but sometimes there is extra sting. This is love.
(Dear God.)