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This is how it might have gone. If the world had turned a little slower.
If the days had been just two minutes longer...
There are circles on the ceiling. She giggles. The sound melts to her toes, hot and liquid thick as he buries a path through the wild mess of her haloed hair. Plants tight kisses, marching-band straight, against her jaw line.
He tastes like cigarettes and cinnamon donuts as she slides her tongue between his teeth. Pulls his hips up to meet her own and waits for the world to stop rocking.
(Waits for it to start. It is the only beat she knows after all...)
“This was a bad idea,” he murmurs, low and throaty. The reverberation echoes, drum-like, through her emptied out rib-cage.
She tallies up their week, loses count when she runs out of fingers, grins, “Which one?”
Google tells her there are just over seven thousand miles of ocean and island and occasional mountain range between New Mexico and New Zealand.
Hopes with her fingers crossed to desperate that one 'New' doesn't cancel out the other. Loses herself amongst the images of snow and white ice and wonders what it would feel like to be frozen solid. Tucks her head low under his chin and drags the covers up and over them both. Does her level best not to shiver as their inevitable unraveling takes flight.
A syringe full to overflowing of substances she can no longer bring herself to name, and the whispered promise that this, whatever it is, ends tonight.
(A lie. It never ends.
She'll cling to the notion nonetheless.)
She loses his erratic heart beat amid the thump and thud of her own. Disappears on a cloud of pink and blue-green as the ice-crystals in her veins melt and morph.
Watches intently as he prepares to join her.
Figures she has to break him properly, all the way to dust and mottled debris, in order to fix him in the end.
(Only it is no where near as calculated as that.
She wants what she wants.)
The morning sun is fire on her eyelids. Heavy and hollow as he shifts, still lost to sleep beneath her.
“Hey, baby...” A whisper that he doesn't register.
There is blood, dried. Paints the crook of his elbow, stained. She licks the pad of her thumb. Wipes his skin clean with her own as he recoils against her touch.
Their flight leaves in seven hours.
(She's not sure at what point she stopped believing they'd actually make it.)
Lights a cigarette with fingers that tremble more than she'll ever admit, blows faint smoke rings into the air above their heads.
Waits.
This is not how it went.
The dark night fell, stopped to stalled and still. Failed to start again.
At least for her...