A/N: I started this thing ages ago and had no idea what to do with it. In the end I decided that it's going to be a collection of short and useless ficlets based upon senses :D
That day wherein mine ears do want to hear her;
Hearing, that day, is from me quite bereft.
This is the happiest I've ever been.
The words make him shrill in a symphony of a thousand different feelings. Excitement, surprise, realization, anticipation, amazement, expectation, love.
No.
Not love.
He's not allowed to love her. He's never been. Maybe he'll never be.
Affection. Sympathy. Synchronicity. Blazing passion. Sexual accord. Unspoken need. Desire. A lot of desire. But never love. He closes his eyes so he can better savor every word, every single letter. He repeats the admission to himself to grasp its meaning, to savor its musicality, to make it real. Because maybe he's daydreaming, maybe Alicia never said those words and tomorrow he'll wake up in his solitary, silent apartment. Maybe those words are nothing more than a gentle wind soughing imaginary, sweet nothings to his ear.
No Alicia. No whispered words of happiness. No happiness. Just he and the wind.
Happiness.
The happiest. Not just happy. Or moderately happy. Not even very happy. The happiest. The happiest she has ever been. And there's some evil, convoluted pleasure in the echo of those words, in that absolute superlative that makes its sound fuller, powerful, compelling. The happiest. The word fills even the most remote connections of his brain. He's still numbed, blood slowly reprising its steady, relentless pumping flow through his veins after their quiet - maybe not so quiet - battle of senses.
I have my ways.
He doesn't have a hard time believing such a statement. Because the way she voices her femininity is already one. An assertion that's so simple, vague and cryptic. I have my ways. But it's the most convincing of every closing argument she will ever give. Or anyone else. There's a sensuality in her deep voice, in the way she blows the words, slowly, provocatively. Everything she says sounds aimed to arouse, to spell, to enrapture and cage. He'd beg her to throw the key in the deepest ocean to hear her voice every day, to hear her whisper craved words of passion and happiness. It makes him feel like a hopeless sailor in the hands of a siren, yet he doesn't fear the witless drowning.
Alicia doesn't speak. She sings. Of passion and lust, of comfort and audacity, of enticement and faux shyness. She sings of long gone days and unrequited feelings that maybe, only maybe, aren't unrequited anymore. Her song is a whispered melody dissipated by the breeze of a late September New York City's night. This is the happiest I've ever been. Her song is an in-tune hymn for the silent glass-and-concrete witnesses of their secretive passion.
And it doesn't matter if he can't share these amorous lyrics with anyone. It doesn't matter if he's meant to be her unique audience, tied to a mute discretion. Now that he better thinks it, he should actually feel honored. He's the maker and sole composer of her absolute state of bliss.
When he opens his eyes again, the whispered nirvana is gone.
There's nothing left. Nothing more than a harrowing melancholy and the far, painful echo of that night, an unwanted reminder that behind the hate there is his offended heart, screaming in agony. And that word, happiest, is only a wrong note in his stifled weep.
