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You love him like a forest fire landslide hurricane.
Because how else, you wonder, does one love a natural disaster except in the way of natural disasters? Except by speaking their language to them? Or, in your case, trying your best at it.
You push his jacket down his shoulders, tug him close and then push him away, back into the wall, red brick the colour of his hair, the colour of the blood on his knuckles, on his fingers around your face, curling from the high of a good, good fight he had with someone an hour ago, knuckles you’ll be patching up later while your heart rattles quietly in your ribcage—
like an old fractured folk-tale ghost-story—
no, you think; no, still too easy—like a horror story—like the breath out of his lungs when his back hits the wall, when his heart gives under your hands. He pushes forward and somewhere you collide—
like the end-of-the-world some nuclear radioactive mushroom-cloud biblical tragedy—
like the stark sharpness of his pupils blown wide, his breath caught in his throat, in your hair, your skin caught between his teeth, both your hearts caught on fingernails and a burst of flames, the boundary between yours and his impossible to demarcate.
"Mon cher,” you whisper, against his skin, into his hair, and it makes his neck heat up; you can feel it do so below your fingertips.
Your grandmother was French and there’s a part of you that has learned slowly and painstakingly how to wield words in many languages like weapons, and then there’s this: the part of you that’s gone, lost, fallen, wholly and hopelessly.
He twists his fingers in your hair (twists a knife into your heart, could have your windpipe in his hands, and there go the folds of your mind coming undone like a ball of yarn tossed on the floor only to be spun to gold—)
It’s like a song when you say his name into the night air, a stuttered breath and that’s it, the very last of you
(—you are gold; you make me gold).
It’s like—
names for love in every language, words, almost archaic, words no one uses, and you pour it all into this one person, save them all for him when no one’s looking, when no one can see or hear.
He doesn’t know how he ended up being on the receiving end of all of these things, these titles, these gifts, these promises. They throw him off-kilter, slice through his defences, and he assures you with his eyes and his touch that they are a welcome weakness. He won’t say it with words and you don’t, neither of you, speak of it for days and days, don’t speak of how you find yourself looking at him like he is the world entire.
Until he does speak of it, lets you know, in his own muted, roundabout stilted way, in muttered words and breaths and puffs of smoke, that he doesn’t know how you do it, how anyone can do it, can place so much faith, so much of everything, even—no especially after having known him for as long as you have.
You can tell the gears are shifting in his head and he looks almost upset, almost disappointed. He tells you that you were supposed to be the smart one, as if you should have known better, far better than this.
And you can’t help but laugh, can’t help but ask, “What’s wrong with you?”
"What’s wrong with you?” he snaps, like he’s sixteen again and a little bit difficult, petulant (and you loved him even then, in spite of, or maybe because of, this). He shakes his head, tells you, “Look, I thought, maybe if it’s you…” maybe if it’s you who believes in him, trusts him, adores him, “then maybe there’s something—”
—and he sighs, brings himself closer, brings you closer. Something worth believing in. It hangs in the space between you, does not ever really need to be said.
He tries it on his tongue, clumsy as it is:
"Mon cher..."
And you laugh, warm, at the sound of it. You kiss him, fond, swallow the words between the two of you.
—like the sun, you think, like all the stars and constellations, a familiar sight but no less loved with each and every passing night.