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Fire is an old friend.
It has burned for Riza in every imaginable form in her life. Indeed, in many ways, Riza has been fire herself. Strong and persistent throughout her desolate childhood, unwavering in this life that she has devoted to protecting the lives of innocents and the ones she loves.
Riza has also been forged by fire in the hands of others. Her father had chained her with it by making fire her burden. Roy had freed her from it, with physical flames far less painful than the secrets he burned off her back. Fire has since been an ambivalent force in her life; something she needed to protect, and yet also something she needed to protect the world from.
But it is only tonight, in the dim, secluded comfort of the couch in her apartment, that Riza is meeting fire for the first time in the form of passion. It’s a gentle rush in Roy’s hands as he runs them through her hair, over the curves of her face down to her waist, across her skin as he helps her slide aside piece after piece of her clothing, slowly. It’s an ache and a glow in her chest, in the pit of her stomach and further below, on her lips and his as their breathy, tentative kisses set off sparks.
It’s a strange new way to know fire, but not nearly as strange as the fact that they have gone this long without allowing themselves a taste of this pleasure. It’s a natural desire, something that they both know has always been there, something that has grown the more time they have spent jointly devoted to the same dreams.
It’s persuasive—it easily leads Riza’s fingers down Roy’s chest where the buttons of his shirt come undone one by one, and it guides her against his body as Roy pulls her close into the spaces between his arms and legs.
It comes out in whispers of each other’s name—their first names—and breathless pleas of “touch me here” and “come closer” and “I want you”—“I need you”—
“I love you.”
Roy whispers it first, all at once certain and yearning and nervous—as if he never imagined that Riza has known his feelings for a long time, or that she has been secretly, guiltily hoping for the world to make room for them to find shelter in each other’s embrace.
Riza looks up, interrupting the kisses she has been planting on his partly-bare shoulder, and she can’t even describe the way he looks at her in the dark. She only knows that he looks the way she feels now.
“I love you,” she whispers back. She’s unable to hold back a dazed laugh, a breath of relief from finally being able to say the words. “I’ve loved you for so long.”
His chest falls with the release of tension. He smiles, strokes her hair with a trembling yet gentle hand. “I’ve loved you all my life.”
When they kiss again, the fire that has been burning between them seems to have changed. It’s just as ardent, just as warm, just as all-consuming as it always has been throughout their lives. But it has stopped pushing them to touch every part of each other that they can reach, or occupy as much space around each other as they possibly could. Their words have done that—filled the gaps between them and made them feel whole without even becoming one.
The fire tames them now. It lays Riza’s head onto Roy’s chest, where she can hear his heartbeat, loudened by want and yet slowed by contentment. It plants Roy’s arm firmly around Riza’s shoulders—he keeps her close and steady as she presses into his body and traces lazy shapes on his abdomen during the silence that has replaced their hunger to make love. It keeps them intertwined in the tiny space they have carved out together—never mind how their plans for the night have changed now that it is at last clear what they are, what they mean to each other.
Fire is the form that their love takes, even in a moment like this.