Behind the wooden door.
Eren's POV
I gently knocked the door and with the patience of someone my age, I waited for my Captain to give me permission to enter and leave the reports on his table, but after a few seconds without response, I decided to venture a little more away and I took a risk to open the door slightly and took a look at the inside. My eyes immediately found my Captain but the discovery of an unexpected companion startled me and I was instantly petrified.
The two of them were sitting on the couch in the corner, my captain and a woman, who absorbed in each other had not noticed my presence at the door. He was slightly turned towards me to accommodate the best he could the woman, which was dozing in his arms with her head resting on his shoulder spilling gold all over his chest, wrapped in a nest of cushions and blankets of fur that protected them from the merciless cold of the room without fireplace, giving them an idyllic appearance of absolute comfort.
What left me breathless was not the unexpected presence of the woman in the arms of my captain, which surprised me, but the expression on the face of my superior. I didn't know that that kind of expression existed.
He was watching her sleep, and although the permanent wrinkles of living constantly annoyed gave him a look of mild protest, my captain did not seem angry or bored, nor altered by the chamber's cold or by the warmth of the blankets. Neither he seemed to react to the shrill sound of the storm against the window. He just looked at her, without blinking, as if he didn't want to miss a single second of the reflections of the mild lighting against the gold spread over his chest or ripple of her breath against the icy air or mild tremors of her long lashes, wrapped as he was in an immutable and languid calm that it's only seen in people who have everything they desire for and how they desire it.
Immediately I felt like an intruder, without any right to contemplate a moment as intimate as fragile. I wanted to leave, close the door quietly and turn around to pretend to have seen nothing. But I couldn't.
I was bewitched by that moment that wasn't mine, without the will of diverting my eyes from those two beings that had the envied privilege to be happy for a few seconds in this cruel world, only with the fact of being in each other's arms.
Standing by the door, spying as a criminal by the crack of the door, watching holding my breath as my Captain leaned his head forward approaching her ear, calling her again and again in a whisper
Petra Petra Petra
As if her name mas the keyword of a forbidden spell whispered with an uncontainable longing.
Petra Petra Petra
I saw him leaning slowly until his lips touched the shell of her ear, and then, they moved to throw something that I didn't catch, at her dreams.
It could have been anything, from the confession of the unspeakable to a comment of the weather.
Words full of mysteries that dripped from his lips and slid by her ear to sneak into her mind, disturbing the quiet waters, making her emerge from her delicate slumber and open her eyes slightly, allowing that two rays of Sun escaped from behind her eyelids to illuminate the face of my captain, two golden eyes which in turn promised to the one they were perched on, the riches of the world, the most exquisite pleasures and the most enjoyable joys.
I had never seen two people looking at each other that way, as if they were contemplating the other for the first and last time. The passion that breathed in the air, so palpable that I felt myself tasting it at the end of my palate, was of the type that belongs to the pages of a book and not real life.
But yet there it was, in front of my eyes, a silent connection that went beyond my compression. A promise of eternity, unbreakable and incorruptible, capable of transcending time and space, of the type "no matter when or where you are I will always find you".
A noise of steps behind me caught my attention and I immediately left the door will close on its own and hide what was happening in the confines of the cold room. I turned around alarmed, on guard, ready to protect the door from any assault. I came face to face with Erd that he looked at me for a few seconds with startled eyes until he saw my tense posture and smiled slightly as if understanding me. Slowly he brought a finger to his lips telling me to not make any noise and then I understood.
We were accomplices, Erd and I, and I suspect that Gunter and Auruo too, in this crime of which we were not part, but that we were thoroughly trying to hide from the world.
We were aware of what that wooden door was hiding, was something forbidden and criticized and that if it was discovered, it would be destroyed.
Therefore, without Erd asking me to, I swore not to say anything about it and so, I became a furious dog, a vigilant guardian of the most searched and never found treasure of the world, impossible to imitate or to equal.
I became protector of a whisper of "you and I forever" hidden in golden hair and blankets of fur, wrapped in condensed breath and mutual heat for an eternal instant, all behind wood door.