Touch

[evieshka]

Written December 2013

Touch


When she found him, he was crumpled and suffering an affliction invisible to any eyes but his own. Whatever it was, it filled the space, rolled off him in waves, an emotion that had taken on monstrous form and was crushing him under its weight. That was what happened when things were hidden away and mostly forgotten: they eventually grew in the dark, large enough to break the locks and batter down the door.

She said nothing. She approached him the way she would approach a wounded animal, circling him, cautious, feet half-sliding along the too-hard wood of the floor so her steps were as silent as her tongue. She treated him like a feral dog and he responded in kind, jerking away with a snarl when she reached out. Her hand recoiled, upward but not inward, not away, and hovered in waiting in the misery-thickened air above him.

She tried again.

It wasn’t acceptance he displayed. With that final burst of energy it had taken to bare his teeth and cringe, he had exhausted what energy remained. How could he have known it would take so much effort to feel so little? Her fingertips met the back of his neck at the same moment the air went out of him. The shock of that touch stopped and started his heart, rebooted, reset.

His lungs expanded with a breath so full it hurt, as though he had been breathing only shallowly for weeks, or inhaling only stale air in a windowless room. Something was dizzying: either her touch or the rush of oxygen.

After that, days would go by and he would climb from one to the next like ascending the rungs of a ladder, with no end in sight and with the possibility of simply letting go and falling into space. When it seemed his grip wasn’t quite as firm as the day before, when he seemed to be suffocating or starving, she came again and laid hands on him: her fingers learned the lines cut in his forehead or the grey in his hair. They traveled the shape of his jaw that had changed only a little since youth abandoned him. They explored the callouses in his palms and the way they could lace with his own.

She asked for nothing. When he encountered her outside of those little pockets of time, she made no mention of it. For all that he searched for their shared secret in her glance or smile, he might have been looking for shapes in clouds. If it hadn’t happened to him, he wouldn’t believe it had happened at all. It made him search harder, growing hungrier not for her touch, but her acknowledgement.

The first time he came to her, it was midnight. He wasn’t falling. His grip was firm, the climb no more difficult than any other now. He scratched at her back door, a half-mongrel shivering in the cold, waiting for the scraps of something that wasn’t quite anything at all.

She was in a bathrobe, her hair undone and the carefully guarded inner sanctum of her thoughts bared with widened eyes and a parted mouth. Though time and again she had seen him stripped bare, fully clothed but naked to the glare of the world, he had never seen her so. The cracks in her stone face were laid bare when cast in sharp relief by firelight. She had a ladder of her own, he learned, and someone had ground their heel on the very hands from which he took comfort. No one had caught her; she had shattered, then piece by piece glued herself together, some of those jigsaw pieces improperly matched, borrowed from other puzzles or missing entirely.

His hands cupped the brittle curves of her cheeks and held her a heartbeat away from a kiss. Eyes wide and deep as oceans threatened drowning, but her hands at his wrists tethered him to safety; he traded breath for breath until the hunger passed, his forehead pressed to hers in silent communion.