Chapter 125
Mireya
Play - I was all over her by salvia palth
All yours. Forever yours
A whole week passed since I grabbed all our things from the house. Dad wasn’t there the next day, probably too busy being out there getting drunk somewhere far away from his mistakes.
Damien asked me to stay with him before leaving Seraphin Bay. So I took Blue, and went there. He has slowly started treating this place like his own, finding new windows to sit next to, and corners to disappear into to scare the hell out of me.
Milo has come by a few times, sometimes with Hayzel, and somehow the house has begun to feel less like his, and more like a safe haven we’re building together.
He hasn’t asked me to tell him about how it went, or anything.
He stayed, taking care of me. Letting me work stupidly on a case he’s almost abandoning. He leaves food beside me when I forget to eat, and forces me to draw more even if it hasn’t been a success.
He sits close when he can tell I don’t want to be alone without ever asking me why.
It’s four in the morning when I find myself looking out at the ocean again. I’m on the rooftop, except this one feels different.
The rooftop I used to hide on had always felt like somewhere I could sit for hours staring at the water and wonder what it would feel like to let it take me with it.
This one is his. And somehow that makes it safe.
The ocean is closer, the cliffs too, and the darkness hasn’t changed. But I’m not alone with it anymore.
A year of fighting against myself to get away from here. A year of finding how easily it was to be ruined by love because of how strong it is and how much it reminded you of what was missing before.
A year of loneliness around people who tried to make me less lonelier.
A year with Blue and a year of grief.
Looking at the sky feels different now.
Damien is sleeping inside, he’s probably thinking about how to rearrange our new life. I’ve been assigned to Virginia’s bureau, the same office as him. How do I tell him that even with all of this, pain is still eating me alive.
How do you tell someone you love that you don’t think you’ll live long enough to let him love you back?
Am I selfish for being tired enough to want to let go?
I thought, maybe if I found another way to numb the pain, life would feel more tolerable. But it didn’t.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with nothingness, I feel it encasing my head, my thoughts, it pushes through my heart and makes it difficult to breathe. This hole in my chest, this voice saying that I’m too far gone, is exhausting.
For a long time, I thought this was what life was supposed to feel like. But depression can feel like you’re still trapped under the rain while everyone else around you talks about sunshine.
No matter how many times Damien repeats that I’m not alone, I can’t accept it. It’s like I can see the end, and my loved ones are holding my hand as we walk there together.
Even drawing doesn’t feel like an escape anymore.
I keep going back to the day dad found one of the drawings I made after mom’s passing. The cliffs. Her standing there. And he burned it.
After hearing him constantly tell me how useless this was, how it would get me nowhere to draw like a lunatic, my brain ended up associating creation with suffering.
That’s why it’s difficult to finish any of them now. The notes are just as messy. It was supposed to help me and even that, he stole it from me.
Art should not be perfect, it should just happen.
Damien’s voice reaches me as the thought slowly dissolves.
Another star is done. I’ve made one for each time my mind itched to hurt myself again.
I miss it. The pain of losing it all. How can I explain that to him? To anyone. I can’t even understand it myself.
The sketchbook is now almost finished after a year of trying. Two hands reaching to each other.
Maybe if I wasn’t born wrong I would’ve been able to give him what he deserves. A pure love. Not afraid to see me drown every time my mind breaks.
If I wasn’t born wrong, I would’ve kissed him the moment I understood he wasn’t there to leave no matter how hard I tried to push him away.
The two hands are finally touching on the page.
And my head wanders as my pen writes next to these two souls trying their hardest to love each other without dying.
Play - How Deep Is Your Love - Live by Remorse, Deprezz, Xizt
Morning finds me on the rooftop a few hours later. I hear the door open behind me and I close the sketchbook quickly before turning. He’s there, standing with a large canvas tucked beneath one arm and a box of paints in the other.
“Last chance to finish your drawing before we leave,” he says.
I look at the canvas, then at him and smile. “You brought all that up here?”
“One morning left, Mireya,” he replies.
He sits down behind me, his chest settling against my back for a second, then turns me back toward him.
The canvas appears behind my shoulder, before he lays it down behind me.
He opens one of the paint tubes, squeezing a little color onto his fingertips, then looks at me. My eyes follow the movement, watching the dark blue stain on his hands.
He touches the paint to my waist, the cold of it makes me gasp. His fingers move slowly at first, leaving a streak of color across my skin, before his hand settles there.
“Paint us,” he whispers as his eyes stay on mine.
I look at the canvas behind me, then back at him. “You’re going to ruin it.”
“That’s the point.” A drop of rain lands against the canvas, then another. He doesn’t even glance away from me when he continues, “Let it.”
The rain begins to fall harder, washing the paint beneath his fingers and carrying the colors across the canvas behind us. He reaches for another tube of paint, squeezes a generous streak across his fingers then lets his hand slide down slowly along my back.
I shiver and his eyes lift to mine. “Cold?”
I shake my head and he adds another streak, spreading the paint across my shoulders, then my hips, anywhere my skin is visible.
After that, I reach for the tube myself, and his mouth curves. I squeeze the paint across his forearms, then drag my hands over his shoulder, smearing it into his skin, until he’s marked with the same messy traces covering me.
He doesn’t stop watching me.
When I’m done, his hands close around me. “Now we can start.”
Before I can ask what he means, he eases me backward onto the canvas. The wet paint is beneath me, leaving a trace of my body onto it.
He looks down at me, rain gathering in his hair in the softest way possible, droplets of water catch in his long lashes and it takes everything in me not to melt at that moment.
“Just leave yourself here,” he whispers, leaning on top of me. A kiss against my neck. Another one on top of my heart and he continues, “Don’t try to make it perfect. I want this to be messy.”
We’re on top of the world, on his rooftop, paint mixes with water on us, the rain is hard, brutally slapping our skins, and all I can feel is his bare chest on mine. The warmth of it, the safety of it all.
A long and delicate stroke followed the arch of my back before he just pushed me closer to him. Blue covers his shoulders, slowly falling on the inked mark I gave him.
Everything is blue.
We fit perfectly against each other, as if our bodies needed each other to feel complete, as if they had been waiting for the other to finally feel fulfilled.
Two halves finding something we both didn’t know was missing.
His lips found mine, wet and warm, and everything around us dissolved.
The different shades of blue bleed beneath our bodies, fingerprints forever engraved on the canvas. I could taste the deepest part of him on my lips as he spilled his soul all over my mouth. The same messy lips traced my throat before returning to my mouth.
Long fingers tease me between my thighs, rubbing through the fabric that blocked us from meeting completely.
I couldn’t stop myself from letting out small noisy breaths muffled between his fingers that kept my mouth parted.
His husky voice whispers against my skin, “Look at us, Reya.” A lick. “We’re bleeding into the same color. Blue.”
His fingers moved faster against my core, his kiss deepened, and each cry that tried to escape my lips was swallowed by him. My hands pushed against the canvas to keep me steady but everything was a blur of raw sensations.
“Let it run,” his deep voice whispered against the shell of my ear, persuading me back from the brink of suffocation as his hand pressed against my throat. “I want the whole canvas covered in us.”
The pleasure was almost agonizing, spreading through me warmly. Everything felt dangerous but beautiful. His hand against me, his lips brushing mine, his chest rubbing against my chest.
I could feel the colors sipping through my hair. I could feel each line of this, us, marking our creation. Slippery, wet sounds mixed with my breathy moans and desperate gasps.
The pace was getting faster and faster, my eyes rolled back as I feel waves of pleasure running through my body. My body tensed beneath him, and then, finally, relief.
A faint whimper came out of my lips, and he bit it down gently into his.
“Next time, I’ll bring a bigger one,” he breathed against my lips.
My face pressed against his bare chest, leaving me to focus only on the rapid beat of his heart and a small laugh escaped me. We were tangled together beneath the rain, and as I looked back at the messy masterpiece we’ve just made, my heart softened.
“Thank you. I finally finished one.”
He looked at me for a long moment before smiling. “It’s beautiful.”
I closed my eyes, holding him tight, and whispered, “Promise you’ll keep it forever.”
A kiss brushed on the top of my head. “I’ll never let go of it.”