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She knows from the start that, one day, he will leave.
It’s as inevitable as the tide; he pulls her in under the brine, under the rock and the waves of his seasick veins.
She falls in love with his back first, because she knows it’s the last thing of him she’ll ever see.
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His frown is the second.
Though his smile is lovely, it’s his frown which snags her attention, brings her heart to heel. Like water spilling over the edge of a dam, it rushes over the softness of his lips, floods the space between his brow. It’s his frown she falls in love with second, because he so rarely smiles – a single ribbon of sunlight among clouds – she holds it close, sews it into the beat of her pulse.
She likes to trace the edges of it with her mouth, with her fingers, watch as he pulls them between his teeth, and the flood turns into a tidal wave, of her body pinned between his and warm blankets, of her name pressed against the roof of his mouth.
But each night she must unsew him from her body, force the flood back behind the stone, so that tomorrow when she rises and he isn’t there, it hurts just a little less.
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His eyes are the third.
It’s the only chink in his armor, because his eyes say what his words do not; though he has no shortage of those, his eyes are the only doors he cannot shut, so she loves them, for now, while he’s close enough for her to see them.
She lets his thumb outline the vallaslin on her brow; the curve of June’s bow, the ribs of a gutted ship. His eyes are blown open like a window during a storm, equally dark, the shadow in a ravine. She doesn’t ask him why this shadow passes his face, only stares at him from beneath heavy lashes. His fingers move beneath her chin, feather along her throat, trickle over her collarbones like a river.
She kisses the shadow from each eye, and he smiles.
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His hands are replete with callouses, with little cuts where a page or a knife bit the skin.
Sometimes, they’re covered in paint, dried flakes of blue and gold and red, caked beneath his fingernails, pushed into the crevices of his fingers like blood. He has beautiful hands, the kind sculptors dream about immortalizing in marble, with his fingers like the long sigh of a river.
She loves them most when cupping her jaw, when he writes her name in bold, black letters, when she has them all to herself. His beautiful hands have been bloodied in her name, just as hers have been bloodied for him. She wants to take his hands and bury them deep in her ribs, clench in the empty sand of her lungs, pull her dry – she settles for them intertwined in hers instead.
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His voice is the last piece, the final sweep of the stabbing dagger.
You are free, he tells her, shoulders bowed as a mountain is bowed against the wind.
It’s his voice she falls in love with last, because he says ar lath ma with no less love than he did the first time he said it, and the dagger stabs deeper for it.