There was something in the firm line of Erik's mouth that told me he would not relent. Bewildered, yet ultimately disgusted, I stood there, facing his stoic features with a glare of utmost resentment. Rain pelted our clothes and heads, and in my grief I wanted to believe that God himself was weeping for my lover.
"Surely there is something that can be done. There are doctors—"
"Nothing," Erik snapped, silencing me at once with that single slicing word.
Time and time again, we would have the same argument. Protestations and angry curses would be hurled back and forth between snarling lips; accusations, cruel and unjustified, placed upon the other like the burning friction of a noose. But this was the night he had first told me of what was to come and I wept senselessly, my cheeks a rosy blend of the cold air and my anger.
If we had been standing in the open streets, I would have held my fiery tongue until we were at last alone, but this was not the case. Our outing was a simple one—a quaint little picnic in a clearing that one of the many twisting arms of the catacombs led to, and we had been oh-so content to enjoy each other's company.
Why could it not have lasted?
Sniffing, Erik readjusted his cloak and hat so that the bare patches of neck and jaw were not in danger of becoming soaked from the rain. He returned my glare as I asked, "How can you stand there and tell me that you will not try to seek help?"
Lithe fingers rubbed viciously at the lining of his cloak as the irritable man looked everywhere but at me. "This is not up for discussion, Christine," he said, raising his shoulders high as though they were mountains he could take shelter under. "It is futile. I do not understand your fretting."
"Fretting?" My own cloak remained fisted in my clenched hands, forgotten about while I spat out the word as if I had tasted poison in my mouth. "No, I would not expect you to understand."
My love for him would always be viewed as a thing of suspicion. I feared this greatly. Our relationship had been founded on turmoil and tears, but even after he had accepted my sentiments, he still refused to see them as a cause for my worry. Intolerable man.
Droplets slid across my hair and face, yet I made no move to find shelter from the tempest—I was already drowning in one of my own perpetual devising. "Why will you not fight?" came my whisper over the storm above us, and he looked to me sullenly.
"I have spent most of my life fighting; now, I am simply too old and too tired to continue."
His hand rose to my cheek, pulling wet strands away from skin with a nonchalance that unnerved me. A want sparred within me, tempting me to wrench myself away, but the sadness in his countenance made me linger. I reached for that hand and held him there like an anchor to a shore. "I don't want to lose you."
Fingers twitched under mine before they fell to his side. "There is nothing that can be done."
Our argument lacked spite and malice, but even so we continued in this dejected manner throughout our journey to his home. He regarded me stiffly when we arrived and did not offer to take my ruined cloak before he scampered off to his room. I knew better than to follow him and if he did not want to be in my company anymore, then I would not disappoint him.
Tearing the wet clothes from my body, I slipped into fresh undergarments in my bedchamber, shivering every so often when my unkempt and sodden hair would send water dripping down my chest and back. The candle by my bedside was lit after several failed attempts driven by maddening nerves and I became fixated with its temperance. The warmth it emitted was slight but noticeable and I was drawn to the flame, a moth whose wings had already begun to fray at the edges.
A noise behind me—a loud creak of floorboard—told me that I was no longer alone. The sleeve on my chemise slipped from my shoulder as I rounded to see Erik standing in the doorway, as silent as the ghost he had once pretended to be. His features, though free from the mask, were impassive, and I cursed them and his inability to share himself with me in such an intimate manner.
Haughtily, I raised my chin and peeled back the covers on the bed, with jaw clenched and nostrils flaring. "If you have come with more excuses, Erik, I do not want to hear them."
At first, he said nothing. The silence was becoming intrusively sickening until the soft dripping of water reached my ears. Despite myself, I turned and saw droplets falling from the lining of his cloak and onto the ground, branding the floorboards and his otherwise spotless boots with dark, cold blotches.
A trembling hand ran over the knotted muscles in my back as I stared at the sight before me. "Erik," I sighed, more wearily than in anger. With his hands loosely grasping the doorframe and his gaze downcast, he seemed to me like a helpless infant. "You shall make a puddle if you do not remove your clothes or yourself from the doorway."
Numbly, he reached for the ties of his cloak, unclasped it and allowed the soaked material to drop to the ground. My forthcoming huff was engulfed the next moment when his arms came about my waist and his face pressed against my stomach. I felt the breath leave my lungs at the impact of his embrace, yet still I wove my arms around him like rope, tying his limbs to mine in a suffocating arrangement. It was not uncommon for him to come to me on his knees, begging and pleading. But he was a cumbersome worshipper of a mortal. Nothing more. He knew of my disgust whenever he bent the knee, but it did not appear to matter.
Words were whispered into my chemise, rumpled by the strength of unholy hands against it, and as I leaned into him, the sleeves slipped further from my shoulders. His apologies were meaningless, but I could scorn him no more. The thought of losing him was a dreaded murmur in my heart. Holding him close, my fingers splayed across his back, moulding themselves over his shoulder blades and neck as my lips brushed the wisps of hair atop his head.
Fervently, he mumbled his fears into my chest and I mumbled my own back, pulling him to his feet and finding his mouth in a surge of distress. His kiss was sluggish yet scalding as though every touch of his lips had the power to melt my flesh. Sometimes I wished they would. To feel my body dissolve into a peaceful nothingness, to simply disappear, would be divine.
Coarse fingertips traced the line of my jaw and I quivered when they skimmed downwards, gently dragging the damp material from my body until it fell to my feet. Under the pulse of candlelight, my chilled skin searched for its counterpart, more clothing fluttering to the floor in its quest for that comforting and searing heat.
The air was heady and a pungent lace of anxious, frantic love came trickling into our lungs. We became drunk on it.
His face nestled against my neck, nuzzling and leaning into the crook of my shoulder. Languid kisses bled from his mouth and onto my skin, feverish yet slow like the flow of magma down blackened rock. They seeped through me and into my pores, poisoning my blood and infecting my veins as the heat coursed and ebbed and grew. If his love killed me, then so be it. Here in the catacombs, my body could rot for all eternity and I would not care, so long as I was with him.
Limp fingers curled about my head, wetting the pillow I now laid upon, until they threaded through Erik's hair. Each strand was thin like a woollen thread, yet they were so endearing to comb. My lover was not a young man, but I adored him and everything that made him who he was. There was not a night that passed that I did not commit to memory a different part of him. The feeling of his hips, hot ragged breath against my skin, his lean build pressing against mine, the contours of his hands as they wiped the hair from my face, and his eyes… Oh—His eyes were fire itself… Burn me, my own pleaded.
The small hairs of his chest brushed against my breasts and I closed my eyes. This was what I knew I would miss. Instead of his biting kiss, I would feel the nip of the wind and mourn his arms in the middle of the night.
He entered me slowly, burying himself inside and I welcomed him, enveloped him, clinging tightly to his shoulders and running my nails unhurriedly across the back that had bared many a beating over the years. A hiss licked at my throat and his body shuddered, a sadistic contortion to my ministrations. The muscles that moved and clenched under my stinging touch were breath-taking.
In darkness he spoke, his voice a curling lure and one that I grasped onto greedily. "Christine," he rasped, lips and tongue flicking at my throat like relentless whips. "Please…" and I groaned. "When I am gone—"
"Erik—"
"No," he whispered heatedly, his fingers slipping beneath my body to carefully roll me on top of him. A tangle of wet limbs and rough breaths followed this new positioning and I wound my arms around his neck tightly, chest to chest. His sighs found my ears as his arms found my waist. Intoxicating beads of water ran down my shoulders and chest as I arched into his embrace. "When I am gone," he began again, stooping to lick a droplet as it settled between my breasts, "do not stop loving me." His mouth branded itself then to my neck, my cheeks, my lips, drawing the breath from my lungs, the very life from my soul. "In death, you will still be mine."
My palms softly found the deformed edges of his face and I held him there, drinking deeply from his lips and feeling him murmur endearments into me. I love you, how I adore you…
"Yes," was my single sweet utterance, my breath as light as silk, sweeping over his shoulders and smothering his heart.
Nails gripped my hips like fangs sinking down into flesh, drawing helpless whimpers with every dig of finger against bone. Our thighs rubbed together as he pulled me to him, rhythmic ardour fuelling our newfound urgency. I leaned my head against his, each laboured breath passing through me like the tick, tick, ticking of a clock, but what would be waiting for us at the end terrified me more than death itself. We embraced one another fiercely with arms and legs and lips, binding ourselves together as time passed around us in ages.
When I was a child, I had many dreams, but none were so prevalent, so delirious than the want to grow old with the one I loved. In my mind, the image of two lovers entwining was thrilling, but it was consumed within flame and ash and the trepidation of being swallowed up by darkness. There was only us in that whirlwind of fire and I could already feel my fingers sliding from Erik's, could feel myself being pulled from him into an unknown abyss.
Without him…
My hips rolled, and in my ear, I heard his erotic drone.
…I could not live without him.
My eyes became wet and I imagined heavy chains in place of our arms, clinking and cold and constrictive, but locking us together forever. May we never move again.
Lined in sweat and rain, our flesh slapped and thrusted and pressed until our cries filled the descending darkness. Our touches were a series of malign curses and with each one, we doomed ourselves to inevitable mortality.
I sighed as the pleasure left my body. Would that we were ghosts—untouchable and eternal.
Chests heaved in tandem as he laid down with me, our limbs still entwined, our mouths open to the poisonous air and to our poisonous kisses. And then he moved his lips to my ear and promised me that he would consult a doctor. The last of the candlelight had blended into shadow and I could not see his face, could not see whether his eyes told of the truth or of the lie behind his promise.
Instead, I held him to me and buried my face into the crevice where pillow met neck. Silently, I prayed that he would have the strength to conquer the evil inside of him and that he would return to me and to the light.
But in that moment, I never wanted to open my eyes again. I never wanted to see the world tumbling from my grasp... never wanted to acknowledge that my dream, like Erik, was slowly slipping away from me.