Brief section of the chapter I’m working on for the third installment of Heartstone:
Her eyes brightened revealing happiness so stark that he bent at the waist, closer, sinking over her, helplessly drawn like a line had yanked him forward. It was a simple thing then to return her half-smile, to match the intensity of her gaze, to acknowledge the bubbling heat unfurling like late petals in spring between them.
He kisses her temple, graceless, conflicted. Anything to distract him from the ardent look in her eye, where tenderness lingers — enough to make him feel unworthy.
He wakes just past midnight, half-stricken, half-annoyed, as his thoughts excuse themselves from his mind. The nightmare is an old one. Its horror gone with the familiarity.
Yet, it still never fails to trick him in the wee hours before first light when he’s most vulnerable. When he turns, addled with sleep, only to find himself alone. No one to stroke his hair in comfort. No one to whisper in his ear or smile in his mouth.
Just the silence.
Cold and encompassing.
I promised to be yours, but there are things in this world like fury and broken trust and other people that don’t understand promises.
If the world diminished to only this, to your laughter, low and rich, enveloping me with warmth and fire and love, then I think I could bear to live in it for a while longer.
I keep writing all these awful things, penning feelings that no longer seem to pass. Words that keep my fingers busy as my head runs with notions that keep me from sleep. I’m lost in amazement by how people seem to find pleasure in what my sadness brings to their reach.
Every whisper of your name comes with the sense of bruising, of a new wound pressed too soon, and I don’t know how to go about healing it.
The only way to love someone is to realize that someday they might be gone from you.
He thought he belonged here. He did — once. But after one decision she makes to stray, he realizes just how easily his world can crumble into nothing.
His life is over here.
Light catches in her eye.
Twinkling. Hopeful. Hesitant.
The words in his throat vanish with an inhale, and suddenly, the rest of the world no longer matters.
Perhaps it never did.