She lived on the rise and fall of his chest, in the world that was his breath landing softly on her face. She lived in the fingertips placed lightly on her chest.
Whatever he gave her, there she was. She journalled her weeks and months around moments of him: not what they did, but what he made her. Strands of him curled around her. She couldn’t imagine the shape of herself without him. She was defined by his contact. She was whatever he needed of her. She was whatever he took. And when his hand took her throat and raised her chin, when his arm bulged with what it took to keep her flush against the wall, that was truer than it ever was.
When he hissed the things he wanted to do to her in her ear, he lived for her soft, frightened tremble, for the pleas on her lips which he seized and bit and savoured. When he made her whimper. When he made her beg. At times, her eyes were thrown wide open with devotion, and she never belonged to him more.
It wasn’t that she lived any less to be defined by him, by only him. It was that she knew the world of definitions that only he could help her find.
The heats and chills that were his to grant her. The ways of making her see, making her feel, making her touch. He would show her how he was going to use her. He would show her how he would give her form. Then she would collapse, and know nothing, and trust hid hands to shape her again.
She would do nothing for a while, remember nothing, and let her find the shapes in him that he’d never knowingly give her.
She couldn’t keep from touching him. She ran her hands along him like he was a miracle, unbelievable, like it was a dream she might wake up from.
She couldn’t take her hands away. She moaned just to graze his chest, his hip, his cheek. It transformed her, and she wanted to be changed. She caught his gaze, and she knew he’d hear her purrs. He could tell what she’d become. She flushed with heat, self-consciousness and shame, but also a longing to be caught so fierce it twisted up her insides. She didn’t stop roaming him. She couldn’t have stopped if she wanted to. She was there to know his every inch.
When he seized her in his hands, she nearly screamed with the joy of not existing but for him, and for his sake. She could forget everything but his force: her thoughts, her choices, her being were all unimportant, beside the bliss of his hands, the bliss of knowing she was wanted, the bliss of knowing he would take from her everything she needed to offer. She was nothing without his touch—but she had his touch, so she was everything. Yet the moments came when she was aware, not merely of what he could make of her, but of what she became when she was in his presence.
He saw, by the light of her eyes, that she was brought to life by the sight of him by the way she lived for glows and shadows on his skin that he would never see. He saw, in the way she brought herself to him the way she made a home out of his body, in his arms, between his legs, in the way his hand got tangled in her hair. As he forced her into place, he caught the agony within the ecstasy, the tortured way she needed more of him, the way he’d sculpt her into something beautiful because she didn’t know who she was without his art, without his sculpture.
She gave herself to him. It didn’t make her any less belong to him, and it didn’t make him any less able to snuff out her sense of being and replace it with his own—but it changed things, and it changed the way she gave herself to him too. And then she felt his hands on her again, and shuddered with wonder at the new ways he’d find to keep her lost.
Love, Life, Broken 