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| Details |
| Author: | inkie |
| Summary: | Bryn Baird has one (1) problems. |
| Rating: | A for Adults Only 18+ |
Chain: Melyn
He’d spent plenty of nights without Melancholy since meeting her.
Obviously there was the first month, month-and-a-half between when he first met her and they had their picnic. (He'd had the idea of her in that time often enough, and increasingly feverishly toward the end, but not even his most vivid nights alone in the dark with that idea could approach the wild reality of her.)
But even since then, he hadn't gone every night to her room – not at first – and when they moved down to the harbor he spent his nights alone in the barracks so as not to stir talk, and he didn't go to her every evening on the ship. They kept an appropriate distance (still inappropriate, he guessed Sil would tell him) and it was a kind of practice, he’d told himself, for when he went home.
It was not enough practice.
It was one thing to miss her for a day or two, to spend a night alone in bed, when he knew he would have her again the next evening, or the one after. It was anticipation, not absence.
Now it was absence.
He caught the ghost of her perfume now and then, felt the invisible warmth of her there at his left shoulder. She was always there, had been for months, and now it startled him – even in the harbor it had begun to startle him – to turn his head and find her not there.
Would you want me to haunt you? she’d asked him, and he’d said yes without telling her that she already did.
At night he lay alone in his familiar bed under the eaves and remembered her perched there at the edge of it, taking his cock to the back of her throat like she'd swallow him whole, the soft sucking heat of her mouth and the caress of her tongue, her incredible lips at the root of him. And how proud she was, how happy; it was the memory of the look on her face afterward, the glow of her even with her makeup streaked with tears, that got him off in the end in the solitary darkness.
I've been practicing something, she told him. He would not in a lifetime of guessing have guessed what she'd been practicing. For him.
He could remember every other time, too, the memories collected like an anthology of exquisite poetry: her long legs wrapped around him, the taste and the smell of her and the feel of her white silk skin, her teeth in his shoulder to stifle her screams. The way she propped herself when he ate her out so that he could see her face, see the sounds she made and the way that rosy flush spread over her, the way her lashes fluttered and her golden eyes rolled back.
It was weird that he’d never thought of it before himself, to ask a girl to keep looking at him, to brace herself so he could see what he couldn't hear. Or maybe it wasn't weird. Maybe it would have felt like asking for accommodation, expecting a girl to do something extra for him. To make herself less comfortable to make up for the fact that he wasn't quite right.
But Melancholy thought of it herself, from the beginning. She wanted him to hear her, and he could, with every part of him.
She’d thought of it from the very first night, the picnic, when she’d done that incredible thing. He’d watched in giddy disbelief as she lifted her hips and her fingers moved with practiced skill against her spectacular sweet and soaking cunt. And even more incredibly, he’d watched her breathe his name with the same practiced familiarity. This gorgeous, fey, innocent girl full of poetry and bravery, a girl from a different universe than his. He’d felt those silent whispers like lightning in his veins, in his blood and bones, in his belly and his cock.
He’d been feeling that lightning ever since. But he was afraid that wild storm was abating now, and he'd be left standing on shore watching it flicker on the horizon. The prospect of that loss was like losing his hearing again, an entire sense gone numb.
When he’d shaved this morning, he saw in the mirror that the marks she’d left on him were fading, faded, gone. She was being erased from his body.
It was stupid, he told himself over and over. It was stupid. She wasn't the only gorgeous girl he’d fucked (just the most gorgeous, the sweetest and the wildest). She wasn't the only girl he’d thought he was serious about (it turned out that thinking you were serious felt different from being serious). It wasn't the first time he’d put an ocean between himself and his girl.
It had messed him up when Lidia dumped him because she couldn't deal with the absences, or when Amie broke it off because he didn't have the kind of money or security a girl waited around for. He’d been stung like that a half-dozen times. It did sting, some a lot worse than others. But if Melancholy changed her mind (came to her senses), if he faded from her too and she realized it didn't matter, if she met someone else while he was away trying to get his life together enough to be something for her – that would destroy him.
It was stupid, and he knew – he knew – that he was not a stupid guy. He knew it was way too soon, that it was way beyond. He'd known even as he did it that it was a bad idea to rearrange his life so fast for a girl. He'd known it when Captain Fallon told him so, and he’d looked him dead in the eyes and done it anyway. But he understood now the urge that propelled people to make sacrifices to an uncertain god. He'd sacrifice himself on that altar to keep her.
He knew he shouldn't even be thinking about rings yet, let alone feeling the stomach drop out of him when she’d said black diamonds. He knew he could date a girl who would get that pearl from him and be thrilled to her toes. That was the kind of girl he should be dating.
But Melancholy upended should. Melancholy was lightning and honey and bruises. Melancholy was a nymph from a poem, a sweet ghost in his bed, and she’d ruined him for anyone else. Melancholy said she saw herself as a captain’s wife in a captain’s cabin, and he wanted to believe that so badly he couldn’t breathe. He was doing this for her, to be that captain, and it felt precariously like losing her.
Your future will be the Reckoning, the fortune-teller told her, and she had cried from happiness when she found out his name, when she knew he was hers. (He’d been hers for months.)
But… the Reckoning, the fortune-teller said. He was just Reckoning. He was never a the. Maybe she’d think about that. Maybe she’d meet someone from the same universe as hers, who lived in a house like hers – who knew how to be in a house like hers – who could buy her black diamonds and knew whether you were supposed to call a butler sir and who made her laugh like he did, and she’d realize the fortune-teller had meant something different after all. She'd write to him and tell him, and she’d be sorry – that was the thing, she was so pure all the time, so sincere, and she really would be sorry – but it would be over.
He didn’t even think he could begrudge it. Not if the other guy made her laugh like he did. As long as it was someone who lit her up like sunrise, Baird wouldn’t even begrudge him.
But it would wreck him anyway.
He’d never heard of a ship that was safer in a storm than not, of a ship that wrecked because the storm passed over it. But now a ship in a harbor wasn’t safe at all: He was made for that storm and he’d be wrecked without it.
He’d spent plenty of nights without her before, plenty of nights alone in the dark with his own hand wrapped around his cock and the ghost of her against him. But this wasn’t anticipation. It was absence. The storm would slip away over the horizon to leave him on the rocks.
It wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t. She was his, and she’d cried from happiness when she knew he was hers, and there was never a girl purer (and less pure) and more sincere than Melancholy, so absolutely herself. He was hers, irrefutably, but she was his too. She promised it and he knew it, rationally. He knew her and he trusted her above anyone. Four months in and he trusted her above anyone.
It wasn’t the kind of thing that had ever seemed worth worrying about before. In all the breakups, all the failures, it was either an inevitable slide or a sharp sting, but neither one kept him awake at night aching with uneasy maybes. Neither one haunted him in the day and the darkness alike. He’d had so much practice with absence before.
But not with the absence of Melancholy.
Would you want me to haunt you? she’d asked him, and he’d said yes without telling her that she already did.