"Just please don't say you love me,
'Cause I might not say it back.
Doesn't mean my heart stops skipping when you look at me like that.
There's no need to worry when you see just where we're at.
Just please don't say you love me,
'Cause I might not say it back."
'Please Don't Say You Love Me' – Gabrielle Aplin.
Fingertips brushed along protruding cheek bones and swept down the napes of necks speckled with goose flesh, hands tangled into hair that was twined and pulled, and eyes had fallen shut with lashes thick and fluttering. Breaths were loud and wet and mingled, lapsing into gasps and uttering sounds of no significance or speech, noses bumped and tickled and lips met, smashed, consumed and quivered.
The two heroes fumbled around each other and in the dark, this quiet moment so personal yet so inconsequential. Shaking hands grabbed to initiate a nervous embrace as they clung to each other's clothing, afraid to speak or pull back or look upon one another in the light. This had been going on for some time now. They enjoyed discovering each other and were still very much in the process, the air was thick as they breathed it in and out of one another, and the space was warm and clammy between them, yet never close enough. Though the two still remained cautious on occasion, the awkwardness had long since faded.
Tongues ventured and explored, teeth searched and fingers clawed, clothing shifted and wrinkled, knees wobbled and backs arched. It was such an intimate, apprehensive exercise, everything was an experiment, and every reaction was assessed. Every new thing he tried caused another ripple to pass through her torso and her insides to melt and pool in her midsection. He was embarrassed by the sounds she drew from deep in his throat, but beneath the veil of darkness she could not see his blush.
Words were hard to come by, labels were juvenile and impersonal at best, talk was cheap and they felt so alive as they came together this way. Every falter improved their next performance, every clumsy move or tentative slip caused a breathy chuckle that gave birth to a tender moan. Together they trembled, sometimes with overwhelming butterflies fuelled by undying nerves, often from sensations they could not function through. It was an overload of feelings that they would never bring to light.
The team didn't know, not a soul outside of themselves knew of these midnight explorations, and by day they, themselves acted as if they were unaware. In their life's routine they went about pretending they didn't know every contour of the other's body as intricately as possible. But the only possible way to know someone's form any better than they knew each other's, would be to live within the skin of another. And in a sense, they did, for she was under his skin, and vice versa. Her fingertips trailed fire up his arms that left raised hairs in the wake like that of a winter chill and she found pride in this reaction from him. But her victorious smirk was lost in the dim and she'd never speak a word of her satisfaction.
Though he made her feel things far beyond comprehension she did not contemplate them beyond the time spent together. Maybe from time to time with fleeting glances and casually brushed skin she'd consider voicing her doubts. But when he whispered his panting breaths against the shell of her ear in the dead of night, she'd forget her name in favour of his own. And though she knew this to be the truth she'd never let him know he had such leverage.
If any words were spoken at all they'd be in his voice, they'd fall off his tongue unbidden and they'd be forgotten within the same instant, but he echoed her name relentlessly, and the sound reverberated between them. She never said anything to encourage nor discourage this, but his voice was always so wanton, as he breathed out that one simple syllable.
"Rae."
And every time her skin would erupt, hairs standing on end and gooseflesh on every inch of her, and she both loved and despised this obvious, involuntary reaction to the way he spoke her name. But she wished beyond comprehension that her name was all he'd ever speak. The implications of such an abandoned call she could cope with if all they were to be was implied, but the very idea that he'd voice what she'd long ago realised he'd been saying all along, left her outrageously terrified.
But nothing lasts forever and this had gone on long enough it seemed, because he'd broken such a fragile thing, and destroyed the precarious situation they were in, he'd parted his lips and gasped out the truth she'd been trying to deny, and with her own mouth closed she turned away. She was the painful truth, and love was the beautiful lie.