Chapter 72
Quill
Seven Paper Cranes
Stay
Gracie Abrams
I rolled over, snuggled into the blanket, and took a deep breath.
The most pleasant masculine scent I had ever smelled filled my nose, making my eyelids flutter until the excited moths in my stomach forced me to blink my eyes open.
At first my vision was blurry, but when my eyes finally adjusted, I watched the shadows dancing along Davian’s wall bathed in warm, dim light.
Davian’s…
I turned my head, slightly irritated. That was all my mind needed to remember why I was here before Davian came into view, and eventually my heartbeat was reminded of what he had done for me.
He was sitting at his second, smaller desk, still shirtless, wearing only his black chinos.
Just as before he’d lain down under the blanket with me, my eyes were drawn to the defined contours of his chest. Not heavily muscled, yet athletic.
He looked down intently at a sheet of paper in his hand, leaning back relaxed in his chair – so that his slightly hunched upper body was impossible to ignore – one arm bent and resting on the armrest, his hand raised to his chin, turning a fountain pen.
His hair was slightly tousled, just the way I liked it...
As if he sensed me watching him, he looked up, and I held my breath as our eyes met.
He had this ability to slip right into my soul with his eyes. And I enjoyed playing this staring game far too much. Could get used to it, even though that was never allowed to happen…
He didn’t know it, but he held the key to my paper castle in his hand.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the fireplace crackling behind him, bathing the room in a pleasantly warm light, along with his dimmed antique Art Nouveau desk lamp, two candles on the windowsill, and three more on the dresser.
Some of the candle flames flickered in his eyes.
Davian was a work of art. In every conceivable way…
I wanted to keep staring, loved how there was nothing at that moment that could stop us; how this tension between us grew with every second he clung to the sheet of paper in his hand.
“You said you wouldn’t let go of me.”
Threnody
Goldmund
My voice sounded like that of a giraffe waking from a coma with a sore throat, so I cleared it, which made him smirk.
Great.
He gestured with the hand holding his fountain pen toward the fireplace behind him.
“I made a fire for you.”
A grin crept onto my lips and I raised my eyebrows.
“How caveman-like of you.”
He couldn’t help but smirk as well, before he put the sheet of paper on the table, adjusted his posture, leaned forward – elbow resting on the armrest and table – and began to play with the pen in his hands.
“You’d be at the top of every cavewoman’s list.”
He looked up with his eyes without lifting his head, a dark, playful glint in his eyes that whipped heat into my cheeks until he looked down at the pen again.
Whatever had just exploded inside me had the primal desire for him to chase me through this house, like the other day, until we both landed somewhere on the floor and he could make me his.
Embarrassed and with the ache in my chest threatening to grow stronger by the day, I inspected the chaos on his desk. Only now did I discover that, aside from the pile of papers, there were other things lying scattered across its surface.
Seven paper cranes.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up, followed my curious gaze, and I, too, sat up in bed and slid to the edge.
His mattress was divine.
“Grading papers.”
He sat up straight, slid back against the backrest and turned toward the desk, where he began to sort through his papers.
“Not in your study?”
“I couldn’t leave you alone.”
He paused for a moment before quickly gathering his papers, and I let the warm tingling in my stomach wash over me.
Couldn't?
I almost said it out loud, and I was sure he sensed it.
The last thing I wanted was for him to walk out and leave me alone after all, for him to regret staying with me, to regret his presence burning his scent and the soft feel of his chest beneath my hands into my mind. So I changed the subject.
“Who would have thought that the exemplary Professor Rydell, whom every law student at Maplecrest looks up to, would be folding paper cranes out of student papers?”
“Those… aren’t student papers.” He hesitated and stared down at the paper birds. “They’re things I wrote. Things I should burn, but can’t.”
My heart skipped a beat when I realized the meaning behind his words.
“When did you write them?”
“Just now…,” he confirmed my suspicion before turning to me with an imploring gaze. “Please promise me you won’t read them.”
I smiled, glad that, despite everything he’d said about his Atrianima personality, he was letting it all out, yet I felt a hint of heaviness settle over my expression.
“Then I’d have to kill your ink birds.”
He smiled sadly as well, put down the students’ work, and leaned back in his chair, again without taking his eyes off the origami figures, staring at the birds as if they had caused him pain.
“We should never have met.”
Kartenhaus
Adel Tawil
The lump in my chest cramped up violently.
The mere thought of never having met him plunged me into despair. I couldn’t have endured the emptiness, would have collapsed under the uncertainty of whether anything could ever have filled that hole deep inside me. Hopelessly.
And him? Hadn’t he said…
The knot in my chest grew increasingly tight.
“We’d both be in Wonderland now.”
I wanted to smile, wanted it to sound like a joke, but when Davian looked up, worry in his ink seas, my voice grew fragile.
“Maybe we would have met there.”
My voice broke completely.
Davian stood up, came over to me, only to sit down on the edge of the bed a meter away from me – bending one leg as if in a cross-legged position so he could turn toward me more easily – before he shifted closer to me and immediately reached for my hand.
I let it slide down over my knee, where his hand met mine as if I were made of glass that had already been shattered and pieced back together a hundred times.
He looked down at the scar that had been torn back open by the pistol's recoil, ran his finger tentatively over it before wrapping both hands around it.
“I’m grateful that through you I’ve been given a second chance at something…” He looked up, something in his eyes that made my heart leap immediately. Pain. “…that, unfortunately, will never be the same again without you.”
Fuck. Those words were enough to make me want to close the gap between us and pull him into my arms.
He knew I didn’t want to let him go. But did he also know that I never would be able to? That I couldn’t make that decision? That I wasn’t strong enough for it? That I might never be again?
“I won’t leave if you don’t want me to, Davian,” I assured him, my vision blurring.
This here wouldn’t be a goodbye. It couldn’t be.
“You know it’s better for you.”
Seeing him so desperate, hearing him sound so exhausted, tore off the fibers of the pitifully throbbing lump in my chest, layer by layer.
“You have no future here.” He shook his head slowly. “Everything about this place will destroy you sooner or later. This town is dead.”
He was right. But that didn’t mean I had to let him go.
Once again, I tried to smile through the tears threatening to fall.
“Where would you go if you had to leave this town?”
He looked down at my hand, tracing circles with his thumb over my tingling skin.
“To the West Coast.”
“Then move to the West Coast.” I squeezed his hand. “I…”
“No.” He shook his head again. This time more desperately. “Don’t say it.”
His eyes glistened. Oceans that would dry up because of me.
“I can’t leave here. This is Lara’s home. A place she’ll always be drawn back to. Tony needs me, and Monica would be all alone…”
Why did his words hurt so damn much? Why wouldn’t this pain stop?
“Quill.” He pulled my hand toward him, gripped it tighter, but quickly eased the pressure from his fingertips the next moment. “You deserve someone who can give you a future. Your dream house, children…”
“What a mundane life…” I laughed softly and raised my eyebrows slightly. “You sound like you mean that. As if I’d ever find another author out there. A Davian Rydell who’s just as lost as I am.”
Davian didn’t return my smile. He stared. Because it hit him – every time, after he had, for whatever reason, successfully suppressed it – to realize that I was the cause of his pain.
He lived. But to live, one had to be willing to allow the full spectrum of emotions.
Without ink scars, a clean sheet of paper was nothing more than that. Blank. Empty.
“Why are you making this so hard?”
“What has ever been easy?”
I smiled again, because it helped me keep from breaking down completely in tears and kept his pity under control.
“Everything in my life is unpredictable, trying to tear me apart. And despite all the pain, the simplest, most natural, and most fulfilling thing I’ve ever been allowed to experience was getting to know your soul.”
Davian’s fingers tightened around my hand.
I begged him with my eyes.
Never let me go again. Please.
“I don’t want to lie. It hurts.” I swallowed the next lump in my throat. “It hurts so damn much to only have a fraction of you.” The tear simply broke free. “But I’d do it all over again.”
Because it let me live.
He squeezed his eyes shut, looked away, breathing as if with every breath a shackle of thorn vines were piercing his chest. And maybe our blue thread was exactly that…
“Do you know what it does to me when you talk like that?” His gaze found its way back to me, even more torn. “You talk to him.” He released one hand from mine, pressed it to his chest. “To Atrianima.”
This time it was his tear.
She Remembers
Max Richter
I shifted onto my knees, which made him freeze instantly, but I didn’t hesitate to lean toward him. Not even his swallowing stopped me from kissing the salt-water pearl off his skin with my lips.
Davian inhaled sharply.
“I’ve never talked to anyone else.”
He turned his head away, eyes closed, as if my kiss had burned him, but I cupped his face in both my hands until he opened his eyes again, looked up at me, and I could run a hand through his hair.
I could do this all day long…
“Davian is the man you’ve been trying to be all these years, to hide that part of you that needs the most care.
The part that wants to breathe. That has to breathe.
You can keep fighting it, keep letting it break you, or you can finally live without restraint, just as this ink battery right in here intended for you. ”
I let one hand wander to the center of his bare chest and he took a shaky breath.
“What if it breaks me?” he whispered hoarsely.
Gently, I placed my hand back on his cheek.
“Then I’ll gather up all the shards and put them back together. Promise.”
“Feather…”
“No.”
My thumb landed on his lips and he closed his eyes, took a breath, and shed another tear that settled around the tiny pearl beneath his skin.
“You’ll never get rid of me if you keep calling me that, okay?”
He opened his eyes and looked up at me.
“I don’t want to get rid of you.”
Those words. That was all it took for me to dare to reach for the stars once more.
The next tear that escaped my eye rolled down to the tip of my nose, fell from there to his, merged with it, before our ink rolled down his cheek as one.
Davian swallowed.
“I want you under my skin, Quill. I want your ink in my blood.” His hands slid under my sweater until they gently rested on my waist. “I want to give you my ink until I no longer know which is mine and which is yours.”
His words made it pound inside my chest.
The despair on his face… I just wanted to take it from him, to destroy it once and for all. And I knew there was only one way.
“May I ask something of Atrianima?”
My voice was just as quiet as his.
I would be his mirror forever.
“He’ll never publish anything again…”
“No…” I quickly shook my head. “Something personal…”
Everything about this idea should have sounded crazy, yet everything inside me was screaming to give him everything of myself. Everything.
He was Atrianima. I knew what that meant. I knew his writing, knew that there would be nothing more intimate to him than what was about to slip over my lips.
“Write…”
He stared at me.
First in despair, then in confusion.
“Write on me, Davian.”
Writing will be the closest
I will ever get to him.
The most intense kind of touch
he will ever leave on me. Art.
– Blue