He is the only one she trusts with her body.
He has the most earnest eyes and his mouth is almost always turned down, and she finds that she wants to kiss the horizon line of his frown over and over again. He is the only one she trusts with her smile, with the secret of her form, with the well-laid plans and inner machinations of her ever-turning mind. She finds that her hands stop working when he thinks of him, his rough voice distracting her from her menial tasks in the most bittersweet of ways; her fingers turn to molasses, desperately clinging to her neatly folded laundry lest she drop it in the dirt on the way back to her bunk. It's easier to make her mind up, then, after she's secured her little pile in the trunk under her bed, and the last of the girls file out to the mess hall for supper. He is the only one she can go to, and so she does.
She carries her heavy pain, the pulp of her liquid insides with her and lays it all like stones at his feet. They meet quietly behind the trees, on a wordless pilgrimage to their familiar supply shed, and she presents him with the offering of herself, one of many sacrificial maidens throughout the history of their world. Her makeshift god looks upon her with his fearless eyes, and for the first time in her life she says a prayer - she exhales his name, light and easy with the breath she's been holding, and he hears her; he answers her.
It's easy to come clean for him. This boy does not squirm at the sight of blood, is not worried by anything mortal. His heart has broken over and over again, and she twists her fingers in his dark hair as his teeth sink into her lip; tonight she will let him break her heart as many times as he likes, her blood cells multiplying in protest to fight the invasion of him. Her ribs tremble with the labor of her breathing and she sighs ragged and raw as his hands fit all of her - yes, it's just as she had planned, labored over, desperately hoped. His palm presses against the pounding of her heart. It takes everything she has, everything she's ever had, not to cry with the irony of it.
How she craved with the ravenous hunger of a starving man to be normal, to run to her father. To tell him how she had fallen in love with a beautiful boy while playing soldier - and he kisses her so hard that she overflows with sensation, pulling him into her, trapped against the trunk of their tree with her small fists wrapped tightly in his shirt. He's devastating, more than just swept into the flow of her and she's helpless; her heels slip from the earth, and his weight slams into her, keeping her upright. How foolish she'd been, to invite the beast into her. He knocks her breathless and holds onto her so tightly she wants to break his fingers.
"Stop it," she chokes out, and her toes curl with the pleasantness of it, "you're not understanding. As always, you're not-"
Quietly does she will him to acknowledge her, dare him to love her, and he answers her with his lion's roar. He sparks a fire with the tinder of her bones; his fingers touch the unmarked flesh she's kept hidden underneath her clothes, and here it is, what she so desperately needs. Her teeth ache with want as he reveals her - neither of them flinch at the ruined lining of her clothes, syrupy stains spreading lazily into the thick fabric. Long since has he cleansed her, taken the natural order of her body and aligned it to his convenience. Her heart drips out of her, down her stomach and out between her thighs, and looks to him. The big, bad wolf lurking in the forest, though she'd been the one waiting long for him in her red hood.
She keeps her chin high, all pale and pointed angles, and he delves into her, a bite delivered to the pulse jumping at the side of her neck; all his touches are fatal.
Hands splayed over his back, she trembles with excitement. There is nothing that could ever hope to control this boy in her arms. He is stone in all the places he juts out, pressing harshly into the softness of her feminine body. How she longs to steal back from him all the things he's taken when he slides into her, when he worships in the temple in the cradle of her hips. Selfishly does she want to keep him, to make him her only exception, her mission. To be human with him, and how it wouldn't seem so bad.
She tosses her head away as her body opens up for him; a last-ditch effort to shield her soul, she's guilty.
Bravely does he swim the sea that floods her lungs. To each end of her and back, he pulls her back together, keeps no secrets, leaves no scars. He's such a selfless, endlessly kind boy, and she can't help but at least take that bit for herself, kissing his taciturn mouth; at times she can't stand the simplicity of him, and indignantly does she dig her heels into the back of his calves, relishing the whine of pain he sputters against her lips. The nerve of this boy for thinking he could love someone like her. The nerve of him for making her want to let him.
"That hurt, you know," he mumbles, and the spreading emptiness within her chest says he doesn't know the half of it.