When he touches her behind her knee, even with his gloves on---always with his gloves on—she makes this sound. She has never heard this sound, which probably sounds a lot like his name, and she is resigned to the fact that she probably never will. He has a peculiar, wonderful and awful power inside of his hands that makes her reminisce about the times she's seen blood on them.
He has hands that make her silent.
They have made so many creatures---so many men-- silent, that it is almost seems the most natural thing in the world. As his hands slide up to her neck, crushing hair between fingers and skin, his face is somber. He is silent too. He has made himself silent, every single self that she still sees moving around under his skin.
Coward is a word that lies strangled and still inside of her throat. It is the most succinct way she can gather every resentment, every terrible thing she could say to him, put it altogether and hurl it at an easy bullseye.
But she is so scared. She trembles when he kisses her mouth. It is the heavy transference of his somber silence that fills her mouth and her ears, but she is so afraid that if she were to disconnect, she might hear all this noise.
That noise might have hands like his, might frame his eyes which don't look at her since they are always turned inward at all the men/boys fighting for prominence, all the mistakes no one man could possibly handle alone. The noise might reach out with its hands and drag her away from him by the hair, because she can't seem to leave by herself.
In the noise, she might hear everything she already knows. His fingers linger over her mouth now, and she feels like it could be the last time she will ever get to say anything to him. There is a gleam in his eyes that looks as mean as it looks tender, and suddenly one of his hands is firmly over her mouth.
He's going to say something now. She can sense it. She can feel him searching for something appropriate, filled with all the appropriate feeling. Whatever he says will break the literal silence of the moment, whatever he says will be clumsy and wrong and will sound so much like noise.
And then she clasps one of her hands over his mouth. He looks down on her, and his eyes are bottomless. There is a question somewhere in those depths, asking so many things, and she answers in the tangling of her legs around his waist.
She answers in words when he lifts his hand from her mouth.
"The children are sleeping." She says. A shadow shifts to the other half of his face, but she keeps her hand over his mouth. "We'll have to be silent. So they don't wake up."