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Star was absently stroking her thumb over where David’s heart didn’t beat while she was raised and lowered by his mechanical breathing. As much as she enjoyed the preceding activities, she enjoyed simply lying with David afterward even more. To have him quiet and present beneath her. His arms around her, clawed nails so gently scratching her back.
She thought he was tracing letters onto her, but she couldn’t make out the words. She’d seen his handwriting. Elegant came to mind, but it needed her full attention to really decipher. She imagined it was how Victorian schoolboys wrote.
She didn’t like to think of the math or the history required to determine how accurate that was.
Star heaved a sigh. His fingers paused before continuing their idle patterns against her.
“What?” David broke the silence like she knew he would, voice a murmur. A slower deep breath snuck into his rhythm. He was content, and wary she would ruin it.
So was she.
“You’ve never told me anything about when you were turned,” she said. The words came unbidden, but it was something she’d been ruminating about for a while. “The other boys have.”
His hand paused again. As did his breathing.
Star huffed another sigh at his rather childlike defense mechanism. Like she’d forget he was there if he stayed still enough. It was just a step away from covering his eyes like her baby cousin used to when playing hide and seek.
She belatedly realized her mistake was in not asking a question. David was using that as an excuse to not have to respond.
She hated that she was going to let him.
His fingers resumed lazily stroking along her spine when there was enough dead air between them.
Star wanted to ask him to breathe again, too.
David was usually good at keeping up a facsimile of life, but sometimes it slipped. Especially when one was on the lookout. It was always just enough to uproot the delusions Star intermittently clung to. She couldn’t convince herself this was all fine when he was cold and still as a corpse under her, his limbs unnaturally animated.
There was no pretending he was anything but what he was. What she could be.
Star squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, distressed at the thought he was doing this on purpose. She was just as unsettled by the thought he wasn’t.
She carefully shifted off of him and said something about getting cleaned up.
David wasn’t there when she came back.
Star was relieved.