by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal
2871 words, nc-17, eternal/beast
"I'm not going to spend my life missing you, you know."
Davis held her eyes over the crackling air of the fortress. It seemed to her that the black crystal was still, poised over the portal that would take him to hell.
When she'd been with Davis she had always been moving. When she met him she took slow, tentative steps to something that called to her; the guilt was rust in her mouth. Then she'd broken into a run , a blank slate and the comforting heat of him. he'd brought her back. When he'd told her he'd wait her feet were standing still but the bottom had fallen out of her world.
Then, the crisis point- the equivalent of nuclear devastation under his skin and headlines that screamed cornfield killer. She chased after him in betrayal and sparks of the last love she had left. They'd run away together if that was what it came down to.
Chloe had never said the right words, not that she'd missed him, what she felt. Davis had tried return the equilibrium to her world, change it to the way is was before he'd turned it. He'd bring Jimmy back to her on drug recovery but Chloe had seen the ugliness underneath. As his last magic trick-he was going to disappear.
"Don't." She said.
"This way the world can have Clark." You can have Clark, his eyes said; he'd known that Clark had taken front and center if not for who he was but what he did. So Davis was leaving to a vapid wasteland, the only place she could never get him back.
"I'll have nothing." It struck Chloe that she'd always wanted her own Kryptonian hero and he was doing it the only way he could. He didn't even know.
"I'm sorry. I won't take another life"
"I'm giving you mine."
"What if I don't want it?" The lie was the set of his shoulders, the way the man who looked the world head on could not look at her face.
"It's yours. I feel something."
Chloe knew that an honest admission of what he felt would be too much for him. He moved and before she knew it she was swung into his grasp. She held his eyes-bewildered heat and hope as his thumb traced her cheek. He closed his eyes first as the red maw swirled around them . She closed a fist over his. Davis kissed her and it was too passionate, deep and full of a thousand promises that would never be fulfilled.
"I want you." She said, but her wanting had never changed the world.
Davis took a step back and his mouth formed a true smile again, that kind she could never stay away from. "Good to know I hadn't completely lost it."
"I'm not going to spend my life missing you, you know." Chloe told him; she was going to live.
She reached out a hand and brushed his sleeve; his eyes flickered. When they fell into the other world together, she thought maybe she could find her equilibrium.
Chloe struck the sand of the phantom zone with paralyzing impact in her side. Davis had shielded her from the brunt of the impact, but even then her body ached like she had landed on hot steel. Davis's face pressed against her shoulder and she felt the muscles work against her skin.
"You stayed with me." he whispered. There was fear, the soft rush of breath like you heard in a romance movie. He was heavy on her and she shivered. “Don’t move.” He whispered into her neck. She fantasized about this very situation, but his tone was all wrong, wary. Chloe touched at his face, feeling the tension coiled up in him. He was hearing something she could not.
Clinging to Davis, she heard nothing more threatening than shifting sands before it struck. Chloe had considered the Phantom Zone a place for wraiths, hostile ghosts, not living, hungry predators for too long.
Something slimy and razor-sharp wound over her ankle and yanked. It whip-lashed her and by extension Davis into the air. Chloe landed in a rolling heap, freezing when she wasn’t holding onto him anymore. She was the aperitif. Chloe dangled upside down in the air before the gaping hole of a mouth, rows and rows of needle-like teeth and vaguely she heard Davis yelling for her. It had her too tight. She gasped in a breath and smelled the ripe, rotting fragrance of decaying blood. She struck out blindly, blood painfully rushing to her brain. The eyes.
Chloe was plucked from the air like a doll, skin rasping. She had half a mind to kick out but she recognized the raspiness. Davis was half-transformed, his skin warring on warped black and his eyes red. He deposited her on the ground softly. A whip of sound took him from her sight, but she heard it roar out of him. There were wet, slicing noises- the impact of thick bony plates on muscled, fleshy tentacles. The tide turned as Doomsday was crushed into that maw of a mouth, let out a howl. Chloe had never been so afraid. She forced herself to limp up because she could be a distraction.
She heard the gurgle as Doomsday tore its claws through its belly at the last moment. The tentacled creature fell with a nauseating impact, and the red eyes that held hers over the carcass looked-almost- protective.
Doomsday must have taken her miles, to a decently sized cave free of tentacled monsters. It stopped short of the opening, as if knowing it’s sized would crumble the cave and kill her if it tried to find comfort for itself. The red sun beat down on it, lighting black scales to dirty orange parts of its side crusty black. Was it…bleeding?
Chloe crawled forward, dragging her leg behind her and laid a hand on it’s side. Her fingers came away sticky and it made a little hissing sound, scrabbling back a few steps. She used to touch Davis like this and it had helped him turn back.
“Thank you. Hold still. I’m going to help you.” It wasn’t sentient in the same way Davis was, but it understood survival, could hear the soothing tone to her voice and stopped scrabbling away. Chloe had to get half out of the cave to reach the looming form. It collapsed into the sand with a thump.
Davis must have woken up about an hour later. The horrific silence of this place and his jerkily breathing body made it seem like years. Davis was sentient though; the very first thing he did was pull out of her clinging grip to assess the situation and reset her ankle. His eyes were terrified and betrayed and loving; Chloe almost wished another tentacled monster appeared just to banish the awkwardness.
“You’re hurt.”
“So are you.” She indicated the black blood mixing with his own, starker on his bare skin and the muscle there. Down girl.
Davis knew how to deal with his own injuries, but she prodded at the uninjured skin. There were three claw-marked gauges tainted with oozing black venom right under his pectoral. The blood was more jarring on Davis and Chloe could see how it cut through to the muscle.
“I’ll be fine.” Davis insisted, moving closer to the light at the cave mouth, dazed from the venom. Chloe wrapped an arm around him and pulled him back. His body was complacent and his eyes didn’t look in the shape to argue with her.
“The sun is red here so Kryptonians won’t heal. You'd be better off here.”
“Straight from the mouth of the professor of Kryptonian history, M.D.” Davis’s was sweating thickly; it was probably some sort of paralyzing drug but he was lifting an eyebrow, making an effort to smile and set her at ease.
Unwillingly, Chloe felt the corner of her mouth curl up into a smile. “That’s P.H.D, actually. You need to let me suck the venom out.”
His eyes widened for a fraction of a second only. He wasn’t Clark. He knew they couldn’t mop ineffectually at it and expect the poison to go away. “Come on, Davis.”
“Be careful.”
Davis held still when she pressed her lips to his chest and sucked. It didn’t feel awkward or unnatural at all. His skin was much hotter than hers, a raspy smattering of hair and skin sensitive enough to goose-bump as soon as her mouth touched him. Vaguely, Chloe wondered what his skin tasted like. She couldn’t find out like this.
She had to be extra careful not to swallow a drop because the poison would kill her in seconds. His head tilted back when she started drawing on his blood. His breaths shifted to quick and she should have been thinking about how much pain instead of how beautiful his eyes looked when they slammed shut. His hand found purchase on her waist and pulled at her top, fingers shaking.
Chloe froze as his fingers touched her skin and tried not to move much when she spat out the poison into the sand. Her mouth was numb. He was hurt, shaking against her, barely moving otherwise. She had him for the rest of her life but she didn’t know if that amounted to much more than a day for either of them.
Davis had barely said a word since he woke, but he was starting to recover his speech. She’d been curled up next to him for nearly three hours before he finally whispered.
“Why did you do it?”
She clenched her fist and loosened it. It was hard to be mad at him. Davis had been trying to save her all along, saved her from getting turned into a yet another afterthought and she didn’t even know if he was going to heal.
“Because I’m selfish and stupid enough to be in love with you. I can’t watch you go into hell alone, and I don’t want that guy I care about to disappear because no one, not even him will make an effort to make things right.”
Davis looked at her, one of his tender, searching looks. By the end of it she wanted to shift her eyes down. “I want to spend my life with you. And if it’s just you, that’s fine too.”
His lips parted. “I don’t think it’s that long.”
Chloe straightened. “You’re not making it any longer by fantasizing about sending me back so you can get back to what you really want and invite more of those things to lunch on you. I get it.”
“I just didn’t want you to give your life up for me, Chloe. It’s not worth it.”
There was his problem. The blackouts and the blood and death had messed him up into seeing himself as nothing more than a shell unworthy of feelings from anyone. If it had been her he would have been the first one to speak on her behalf.
“Stop talking.”
“You’re the only one to ever love me.” His eyes were wet, like when he’d said it to her the first time. “I didn’t want you to suffer for it.” Davis crawled back from her a little further.
“I chose it, so deal.” If she reached an arm out she could get him to hold her again. She wouldn’t. She wasn’t sorry. She was just feeling cold. Desert nights were even colder here than in real deserts.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I do want you here.” he said very softly. “You’re the only one.” He kept looking at her and got closer, probably to get his jacket. Chloe ignored him and sat up to wipe the poison taste from her mouth again, only to close her eyes at he licked softly at her chaffed ankle. She hadn’t expected him to return the favor. He kissed her knee and up her thigh. She held her hands stiff because they were coated in red and she was angry and she wanted nothing more than to slide them into his hair.
When he kissed her mouth the response was automatic, wanting and squirming and not having to manipulate him into not dying. His mouth was parching and hot and flush on hers, (somehow even warmer than the rest of him) and his hands were on her face like he was holding her so she wouldn’t get away. If he wanted to play it like that- Chloe scratched at his neck and he shifted her down. No doubt about his intentions now.
There was sex that was about lust, sex that was about anger, sex that was about yearning and soft feelings and this was neither and all of them. He bit at her mouth to be let in, warm humid, living heat and Chloe sucked on his tongue. His mouth fumbled under her jaw line before his mouth teased wetly between her breasts and trailed down her abdomen. White-hot heat started to spike through her. Davis dragged himself up her like some sort of animal and she knew he smelled it.
Chloe raised herself to her knees and tore at her jacket, missing the warmth but counting on him to be the heat. If she didn’t deal with the clothes he would and this was the only pair she would have for a long time. She let them drop. Her forehead slouched into his shoulder and he pressed between her legs with sudden electric pressure, hesitated and watched her eyes and seeing some invisible thing, pushed his cock inside. Chloe’s eyes watered, he was in her rough and so deep it ached.
She’d wondered sometimes, how it would be, if it would hurt. She couldn’t connect it with the vague stirrings with Jimmy that vanished as soon as he rolled over. Davis seemed like too much passion, too much for her too handle. Maybe she’d been right. Davis pulled her forward, palms huge against her face and he was just hard inside her, not doing anything at all. Chloe felt like some part of her displaced and left only room for him. She started it, aligning them to kiss him better, shifting her hips against his.
His hands closed over them and he kissed her roughly, pausing to push her into a cold, rasping wall. Chloe wanted to let him know it was uncomfortable but he’d dropped his head into her shoulder, pulsing and hot and doing something at last. Chloe’s eyes fixed on the ominous cave mouth and closed and she could have sworn she saw sparks.
Davis's skin thrummed over hers, her hands tried unsuccessfully to sooth the blood dripping from the reopened cut in his side and clawed at his ass instead. Davis hissed a slow breath from between his teeth and rolled her against the wall- clutching at her shoulders, elbows, her hips like he couldn’t get close enough.
In any other place, it could have been rationalized as an effort to save one or both of them. It was out of their hands now. His hands wrapped and fisted in her hair, his mouth at buried itself against her throat, almost as if he was trying to forget about everything that surrounded them. Davis hated not being able to save her from what he saw as his punishment; he took his and his evil alien parent’s responsibilities upon himself, that’s just how he was. Chloe understood. He rocked a little more violently and what she needed to say parched and cracked in her throat with a small orgasmic sound. She was drenched in heat and the blood roared in her ears.
The pleasure was like plummeting; complete freefall, waiting for another impact. It was coming, quivering through her overtaxed nerve endings again and Davis notched his head into her shoulder. She bit into her lip and drew blood and she couldn’t taste the venom anymore so she licked at his neck and his skin tasted like salt. Black closed over the sides of her vision, but she felt him tossing and quivering and his hands stroking over her knee when he spilled into her. Then her knees went.
Her arguments about his culpability issues were temporarily halted by her inability to string two sentences together. Davis carried her to the corner and she curled around his arm, steering clear of the injured parts. She was warmed by the erratic sound of his heart and him but she was sticky and cold. She groped for her jacket and curled the arm of it around him.
“I don’t deserve you.” He said softly, tracing at her nose with a blunt finger. “Because of you I have a reason to go on.” He rolled over and looked at her with earnest eyes. “I’ll take care of you.” Chloe nudged his shoulder and his hands seemed to develop a will of their own. “I’ll get to know the terrain. You can explain the phantoms, we can catalog the species and learn which to avoid, I’ll learn to control the beast…”
Chloe breathed in the scent of his skin and felt her ankle prickle under his roving, curious weight. She could see it already-he’d catch her things to eat with his hands and come home naked and they’d probably die of acute sexual exhaustion.
Davis pulled her hands over her head and kissed her wrists. They had a lot a time to make up for, and she’d almost forgotten what they had been arguing about. But she took advantage of the last moment to make her point.
“I’m still not sorry I came.”
Davis held her eyes over the crackling air of the fortress. It seemed to her that the black crystal was still, poised over the portal that would take him to hell.
When she'd been with Davis she had always been moving. When she met him she took slow, tentative steps to something that called to her; the guilt was rust in her mouth. Then she'd broken into a run , a blank slate and the comforting heat of him. he'd brought her back. When he'd told her he'd wait her feet were standing still but the bottom had fallen out of her world.
Then, the crisis point- the equivalent of nuclear devastation under his skin and headlines that screamed cornfield killer. She chased after him in betrayal and sparks of the last love she had left. They'd run away together if that was what it came down to.
Chloe had never said the right words, not that she'd missed him, what she felt. Davis had tried return the equilibrium to her world, change it to the way is was before he'd turned it. He'd bring Jimmy back to her on drug recovery but Chloe had seen the ugliness underneath. As his last magic trick-he was going to disappear.
"Don't." She said.
"This way the world can have Clark." You can have Clark, his eyes said; he'd known that Clark had taken front and center if not for who he was but what he did. So Davis was leaving to a vapid wasteland, the only place she could never get him back.
"I'll have nothing." It struck Chloe that she'd always wanted her own Kryptonian hero and he was doing it the only way he could. He didn't even know.
"I'm sorry. I won't take another life"
"I'm giving you mine."
"What if I don't want it?" The lie was the set of his shoulders, the way the man who looked the world head on could not look at her face.
"It's yours. I feel something."
Chloe knew that an honest admission of what he felt would be too much for him. He moved and before she knew it she was swung into his grasp. She held his eyes-bewildered heat and hope as his thumb traced her cheek. He closed his eyes first as the red maw swirled around them . She closed a fist over his. Davis kissed her and it was too passionate, deep and full of a thousand promises that would never be fulfilled.
"I want you." She said, but her wanting had never changed the world.
Davis took a step back and his mouth formed a true smile again, that kind she could never stay away from. "Good to know I hadn't completely lost it."
"I'm not going to spend my life missing you, you know." Chloe told him; she was going to live.
She reached out a hand and brushed his sleeve; his eyes flickered. When they fell into the other world together, she thought maybe she could find her equilibrium.
Chloe struck the sand of the phantom zone with paralyzing impact in her side. Davis had shielded her from the brunt of the impact, but even then her body ached like she had landed on hot steel. Davis's face pressed against her shoulder and she felt the muscles work against her skin.
"You stayed with me." he whispered. There was fear, the soft rush of breath like you heard in a romance movie. He was heavy on her and she shivered. “Don’t move.” He whispered into her neck. She fantasized about this very situation, but his tone was all wrong, wary. Chloe touched at his face, feeling the tension coiled up in him. He was hearing something she could not.
Clinging to Davis, she heard nothing more threatening than shifting sands before it struck. Chloe had considered the Phantom Zone a place for wraiths, hostile ghosts, not living, hungry predators for too long.
Something slimy and razor-sharp wound over her ankle and yanked. It whip-lashed her and by extension Davis into the air. Chloe landed in a rolling heap, freezing when she wasn’t holding onto him anymore. She was the aperitif. Chloe dangled upside down in the air before the gaping hole of a mouth, rows and rows of needle-like teeth and vaguely she heard Davis yelling for her. It had her too tight. She gasped in a breath and smelled the ripe, rotting fragrance of decaying blood. She struck out blindly, blood painfully rushing to her brain. The eyes.
Chloe was plucked from the air like a doll, skin rasping. She had half a mind to kick out but she recognized the raspiness. Davis was half-transformed, his skin warring on warped black and his eyes red. He deposited her on the ground softly. A whip of sound took him from her sight, but she heard it roar out of him. There were wet, slicing noises- the impact of thick bony plates on muscled, fleshy tentacles. The tide turned as Doomsday was crushed into that maw of a mouth, let out a howl. Chloe had never been so afraid. She forced herself to limp up because she could be a distraction.
She heard the gurgle as Doomsday tore its claws through its belly at the last moment. The tentacled creature fell with a nauseating impact, and the red eyes that held hers over the carcass looked-almost- protective.
Doomsday must have taken her miles, to a decently sized cave free of tentacled monsters. It stopped short of the opening, as if knowing it’s sized would crumble the cave and kill her if it tried to find comfort for itself. The red sun beat down on it, lighting black scales to dirty orange parts of its side crusty black. Was it…bleeding?
Chloe crawled forward, dragging her leg behind her and laid a hand on it’s side. Her fingers came away sticky and it made a little hissing sound, scrabbling back a few steps. She used to touch Davis like this and it had helped him turn back.
“Thank you. Hold still. I’m going to help you.” It wasn’t sentient in the same way Davis was, but it understood survival, could hear the soothing tone to her voice and stopped scrabbling away. Chloe had to get half out of the cave to reach the looming form. It collapsed into the sand with a thump.
Davis must have woken up about an hour later. The horrific silence of this place and his jerkily breathing body made it seem like years. Davis was sentient though; the very first thing he did was pull out of her clinging grip to assess the situation and reset her ankle. His eyes were terrified and betrayed and loving; Chloe almost wished another tentacled monster appeared just to banish the awkwardness.
“You’re hurt.”
“So are you.” She indicated the black blood mixing with his own, starker on his bare skin and the muscle there. Down girl.
Davis knew how to deal with his own injuries, but she prodded at the uninjured skin. There were three claw-marked gauges tainted with oozing black venom right under his pectoral. The blood was more jarring on Davis and Chloe could see how it cut through to the muscle.
“I’ll be fine.” Davis insisted, moving closer to the light at the cave mouth, dazed from the venom. Chloe wrapped an arm around him and pulled him back. His body was complacent and his eyes didn’t look in the shape to argue with her.
“The sun is red here so Kryptonians won’t heal. You'd be better off here.”
“Straight from the mouth of the professor of Kryptonian history, M.D.” Davis’s was sweating thickly; it was probably some sort of paralyzing drug but he was lifting an eyebrow, making an effort to smile and set her at ease.
Unwillingly, Chloe felt the corner of her mouth curl up into a smile. “That’s P.H.D, actually. You need to let me suck the venom out.”
His eyes widened for a fraction of a second only. He wasn’t Clark. He knew they couldn’t mop ineffectually at it and expect the poison to go away. “Come on, Davis.”
“Be careful.”
Davis held still when she pressed her lips to his chest and sucked. It didn’t feel awkward or unnatural at all. His skin was much hotter than hers, a raspy smattering of hair and skin sensitive enough to goose-bump as soon as her mouth touched him. Vaguely, Chloe wondered what his skin tasted like. She couldn’t find out like this.
She had to be extra careful not to swallow a drop because the poison would kill her in seconds. His head tilted back when she started drawing on his blood. His breaths shifted to quick and she should have been thinking about how much pain instead of how beautiful his eyes looked when they slammed shut. His hand found purchase on her waist and pulled at her top, fingers shaking.
Chloe froze as his fingers touched her skin and tried not to move much when she spat out the poison into the sand. Her mouth was numb. He was hurt, shaking against her, barely moving otherwise. She had him for the rest of her life but she didn’t know if that amounted to much more than a day for either of them.
Davis had barely said a word since he woke, but he was starting to recover his speech. She’d been curled up next to him for nearly three hours before he finally whispered.
“Why did you do it?”
She clenched her fist and loosened it. It was hard to be mad at him. Davis had been trying to save her all along, saved her from getting turned into a yet another afterthought and she didn’t even know if he was going to heal.
“Because I’m selfish and stupid enough to be in love with you. I can’t watch you go into hell alone, and I don’t want that guy I care about to disappear because no one, not even him will make an effort to make things right.”
Davis looked at her, one of his tender, searching looks. By the end of it she wanted to shift her eyes down. “I want to spend my life with you. And if it’s just you, that’s fine too.”
His lips parted. “I don’t think it’s that long.”
Chloe straightened. “You’re not making it any longer by fantasizing about sending me back so you can get back to what you really want and invite more of those things to lunch on you. I get it.”
“I just didn’t want you to give your life up for me, Chloe. It’s not worth it.”
There was his problem. The blackouts and the blood and death had messed him up into seeing himself as nothing more than a shell unworthy of feelings from anyone. If it had been her he would have been the first one to speak on her behalf.
“Stop talking.”
“You’re the only one to ever love me.” His eyes were wet, like when he’d said it to her the first time. “I didn’t want you to suffer for it.” Davis crawled back from her a little further.
“I chose it, so deal.” If she reached an arm out she could get him to hold her again. She wouldn’t. She wasn’t sorry. She was just feeling cold. Desert nights were even colder here than in real deserts.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I do want you here.” he said very softly. “You’re the only one.” He kept looking at her and got closer, probably to get his jacket. Chloe ignored him and sat up to wipe the poison taste from her mouth again, only to close her eyes at he licked softly at her chaffed ankle. She hadn’t expected him to return the favor. He kissed her knee and up her thigh. She held her hands stiff because they were coated in red and she was angry and she wanted nothing more than to slide them into his hair.
When he kissed her mouth the response was automatic, wanting and squirming and not having to manipulate him into not dying. His mouth was parching and hot and flush on hers, (somehow even warmer than the rest of him) and his hands were on her face like he was holding her so she wouldn’t get away. If he wanted to play it like that- Chloe scratched at his neck and he shifted her down. No doubt about his intentions now.
There was sex that was about lust, sex that was about anger, sex that was about yearning and soft feelings and this was neither and all of them. He bit at her mouth to be let in, warm humid, living heat and Chloe sucked on his tongue. His mouth fumbled under her jaw line before his mouth teased wetly between her breasts and trailed down her abdomen. White-hot heat started to spike through her. Davis dragged himself up her like some sort of animal and she knew he smelled it.
Chloe raised herself to her knees and tore at her jacket, missing the warmth but counting on him to be the heat. If she didn’t deal with the clothes he would and this was the only pair she would have for a long time. She let them drop. Her forehead slouched into his shoulder and he pressed between her legs with sudden electric pressure, hesitated and watched her eyes and seeing some invisible thing, pushed his cock inside. Chloe’s eyes watered, he was in her rough and so deep it ached.
She’d wondered sometimes, how it would be, if it would hurt. She couldn’t connect it with the vague stirrings with Jimmy that vanished as soon as he rolled over. Davis seemed like too much passion, too much for her too handle. Maybe she’d been right. Davis pulled her forward, palms huge against her face and he was just hard inside her, not doing anything at all. Chloe felt like some part of her displaced and left only room for him. She started it, aligning them to kiss him better, shifting her hips against his.
His hands closed over them and he kissed her roughly, pausing to push her into a cold, rasping wall. Chloe wanted to let him know it was uncomfortable but he’d dropped his head into her shoulder, pulsing and hot and doing something at last. Chloe’s eyes fixed on the ominous cave mouth and closed and she could have sworn she saw sparks.
Davis's skin thrummed over hers, her hands tried unsuccessfully to sooth the blood dripping from the reopened cut in his side and clawed at his ass instead. Davis hissed a slow breath from between his teeth and rolled her against the wall- clutching at her shoulders, elbows, her hips like he couldn’t get close enough.
In any other place, it could have been rationalized as an effort to save one or both of them. It was out of their hands now. His hands wrapped and fisted in her hair, his mouth at buried itself against her throat, almost as if he was trying to forget about everything that surrounded them. Davis hated not being able to save her from what he saw as his punishment; he took his and his evil alien parent’s responsibilities upon himself, that’s just how he was. Chloe understood. He rocked a little more violently and what she needed to say parched and cracked in her throat with a small orgasmic sound. She was drenched in heat and the blood roared in her ears.
The pleasure was like plummeting; complete freefall, waiting for another impact. It was coming, quivering through her overtaxed nerve endings again and Davis notched his head into her shoulder. She bit into her lip and drew blood and she couldn’t taste the venom anymore so she licked at his neck and his skin tasted like salt. Black closed over the sides of her vision, but she felt him tossing and quivering and his hands stroking over her knee when he spilled into her. Then her knees went.
Her arguments about his culpability issues were temporarily halted by her inability to string two sentences together. Davis carried her to the corner and she curled around his arm, steering clear of the injured parts. She was warmed by the erratic sound of his heart and him but she was sticky and cold. She groped for her jacket and curled the arm of it around him.
“I don’t deserve you.” He said softly, tracing at her nose with a blunt finger. “Because of you I have a reason to go on.” He rolled over and looked at her with earnest eyes. “I’ll take care of you.” Chloe nudged his shoulder and his hands seemed to develop a will of their own. “I’ll get to know the terrain. You can explain the phantoms, we can catalog the species and learn which to avoid, I’ll learn to control the beast…”
Chloe breathed in the scent of his skin and felt her ankle prickle under his roving, curious weight. She could see it already-he’d catch her things to eat with his hands and come home naked and they’d probably die of acute sexual exhaustion.
Davis pulled her hands over her head and kissed her wrists. They had a lot a time to make up for, and she’d almost forgotten what they had been arguing about. But she took advantage of the last moment to make her point.
“I’m still not sorry I came.”
Excellent.
ReplyDeleteI particularly loved the sentence, "Chloe felt like some part of her displaced and left only room for him."