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He’s like a hole in your chest, a bullet wound that never healed properly. His fingers thread in with yours perfectly and you could sit with his hand in yours and yours in his for hours without noticing. There’s an easy comfort from his touch, and the way his thigh feels resting side-by-side with yours or naked and pressed against you.
His body can slot in against yours, his spine a question mark upon which his head sits, tucked neatly under yours as you breathe him in. You wish you could smell something other than incense and clove in his hair, wish you could still smell the ozone and the dirt after a rainstorm. He used to love the rain, and the feel of it against his warm skin, chilling him to the core. He said that, when he closed his eyes and felt it against him, felt the thrum of earth alive with the water falling over everything, he finally understood what it meant to be human.
You don’t think he remembers that feeling. You don’t think he remembers the feeling of your fingertips trailing up his spine, or your lips ghosting against his skin. You don’t think he remembers much of anything, as he looks at you with glassy eyes and a toothy grin. You think he is the dust after the rain, muddled and dirty and raw.
In the soft morning light of the dawn, you like the think he’s human. The light that flows in through the dirtied windows covers him gently, pooling between the hard nobs of his spine and the bumps of his ribs. The soft rise and fall of his back and the shifting behind his eyelids all give to your selfish illusion, making him seem soft and reachable. Making you think that you could just reach out and touch him; that you were allowed to do that. Making you think that this unbroken peacefulness meant love – unhurried, deep, unchanging love. The kind you’d shared with him before the drugs, before the alcohol, before the anger and the loss and the cabin walls pressing in on your every side.
But a moment of peace and the illusion of humanity are not what make up love. Love was the dust and the rain before they collided, and you’re lying in bed with the aftermath. Love was him giving up his wings to grow old with you, and you pressed love into every one of his scars. Love was not in the cabin with the remnants of you and him; it was barefoot in the rain on an August night, laughing while the thunder cracked and the lightening split the sky. It was asking you the dance with it, and grabbing your hands so quick you both toppled over into the mud and ended up covered. It was shivering in the backseat, wrapped in a bloody towel while you laughed and drove on until dirty neon lights shone on the road before you.
You were never sure what love was until the rain dried up.
(He stirs in the morning light and sees you watching.
“Creepy,” he mutters, a hollow echo of your own words. He falls back asleep.
You smile. There’s nothing behind the action, just a reflex of muscles.
“I love you,” you say. “Ignore the present tense.”)