Author's Note: I was watching Jess/Rory's first kiss over and over and over again, feeling a bit sad, and listening to Sufjan Stevens (don't feel bad if you don't know who that is). Then this came out. Hmm. Once again, thank you to Lauren for her support :)
Singeing Ice
His voice is always softer when he speaks to her, about her. It's as though it melts, caramelizes somehow when her name is mentioned, either at or below the surface of words. He loses the force of breath which makes his words full and whole, because she makes him disintegrate.
Rory causes Jess lose his bad-boy nerve, she makes him real, a human fucking being.
She mends all his wounds, visible and not. The ones she knows, and the ones she doesn't.
He stretches as he gets up from the bed, listening to the somehow delightful crack of his unused ankles with a keen ear. He stares at what must be some kind of sick dream in his bed.
She can't be real. He'll wake up any second now, head pounding from the heady rush of a brutal, taunting hangover caused by the glass of fire that he previously tried to drown it all in.
But then he reaches out, just to see. To touch her. To feel the warmth of innocence and piety. And she moves. The ghostly angel before him moves toward him, her nose crinkling upwards and a small sigh falling from her light pink lips.
He really needs to quit talking to Matthew's poet.
He's getting way too into this whole brooding thing.
But then he watches as her face relaxes into a concentrated frown, as though she's focusing her hardest on something, and he thinks about how she had the same face when she asked him last night.
"Will you really stay this time?"
It was silently said, stated beneath the surface of their soft sighs and taken-together breaths.
Her face crinkled, and he saw what he knew some part of her wanted him to see – the two years of bottled-up, unadulterated pain. The hurt. The remorse. The wounds that had healed once, but now were re-opened and exposed for his own private viewing.
He looks at her now with different eyes. Outside eyes. He tries to remove himself from the scene, to look at her as though she's a stranger.
It doesn't work, and he still feels that hollow emptiness where the invisible knife has plunged into his abdomen. This is killing him. He hates it.
He hates to love her, because it's the worst thing he's ever known. He despises it because it is real, it is raw, it is constant.
And she's the only thing that's ever made him feel that.
And it hurts because he knows he's bad for her, that he's already tearing her apart, even though she doesn't, can't, know or realize it.
He's tried finding others, to no avail. No one compares to her, no one is the same as this ethereal beauty that lays before him.
Jess stares out the window at the small sliver of moon as he traces his hands over the wrinkles in the bed absentmindedly. The moon reminds him of his heart – the small, barely-there sliver that remains after the rest has been carved away into the shape of her.
The sliver is there to remind him of the fact that he needs her. He needs her to make him whole. The sliver tells him how if she weren't there, the sliver would be all he has, and that would be pathetic.
Him as he truly is.
Pathetic.
"You look deep in thought." Her voice melts him once again. He feels himself heating up, her warmth radiating towards him, though her eyes are closed. She is like the sun, emitting light and hot electricity from her inner core – they hit him quickly, bringing him back into the sense of mind required in order to keep up with her.
"How can you tell with your eyes closed?" He murmurs, a twang of sarcasm in his softer tone. She doesn't answer him, just burrows further under the covers.
He's painfully aware of the cool-from-the-open-window sheets pushing onto his kneecaps as he crawls across to her. Pressing a kiss on each cheek, then her forehead, eyelids, and finally her sacred lips, he lets her nestle into him.
The cold to counter her warmth.
"Mmm," she mumbles into his shoulder. "I like this."
"Me too," he whispers. Again, his voice is soft, with a tinge of vulnerability that only Rory can provoke.
Jess kisses her and can taste the remnants of past kisses in her mouth. Her tongue curiously finds his, entangling and slowly pushing inside of his mouth. In return, he runs his own tongue across the back of her top row of teeth. She bites down, ever-so-gently, and he is positive that he's never felt anything more earth-shattering than the twitter that flies through his body in that millisecond after teeth meet wet muscle.
Their tongues pull away from the slight battle being had, and the heat of the kiss dwindles a bit as passions turn to pecks upon their lips. And finally, they lay, their heads bent together, staring at one another.
"Even after all this time, I still don't believe that I truly deserve you."
He knows she can see it in his eyes. You'd have to be blind not to. He hates that it's so damn obvious, but that's part of being with her. All emotions bared for her to see. Everything.
"I love you," Rory tells him simply. "And you do." The silent response to his unspoken self-doubt.
She loves him because they can have these non-verbal conversations. Because they communicate with their eyes, with their touches, with their minds.
And he hates her sometimes for the same reason.
"I love you too," he replied softly, drawing her face to his own to push his lips against hers. Her skin presses against him, singeing the cold that lies beneath him. He feels happy in that moment, truly happy. All the negativity disappears from his thoughts and he focuses on the light she casts in the deep, dark caverns within him.
Just that one touch, it mends him. Because she is all-powerful to him. For him.
And for the time being, he is at peace, at rest. Their hands entwine, his thumbs running over the top of the soft hills and valleys of her fingers. He breathes deeply, breathes in the scent of her sweet sweat mixed with his own, of cigarettes and lilies.
They fall asleep that way. And he dreams of their life together, growing old, the white-picket fence, a dog – all that shit he used to mercilessly mock.
He awakens to find her nestled into his side, and digs a cigarette out of the pack next to him on the nightstand, trying his damnedest not to jostle her beautiful sleep. As the smoke swirls inside of his mouth, he thinks about just how right this is. Even if he doesn't deserve her, in moral terms, this is still right.
It is right in the way that no one else fits his angles and lines the way her curves and slopes do. It is right in that her soft, good soul counter-acts with his bitter, scarred one to make him bearable for the outside world.
So Jess lays next to her, drawing small circles on her exposed arm, feeling her warmth become part of him, for eternity.
And finally, he believes.
End Note: I don't know what this is, or if I even really fully like it * ponders *. But somehow, I'm still proud of it... Review?