you couldn't pay me to give up on these two. klaroline is NOT OVER.
x
cause you are a piece of me I wish I didn't need, chasing relentlessly, still fight and I don't know why
x
it was the kind of scene she had always pictured when she was young, foolishly hopeful, and utterly human.
a beautiful boy with bow and arrow lips and hazelnut whorls of wispy hair, bottle green eyes and a lying smirk that made her knees quiver and kept her right in place though she could swear to all holy hell that she was whooshing away.
she runs and he chases. the rhythm of his footsteps is almost as erratic as her heart.
x
it plays out nothing like good little girls are supposed to imagine.
his hands are tights and fierce, twisted around her body, memorizing the coast of her curves, tasting the porcelain skin. he's forceful as she thought he would be, rough and tumble, and still something is so gentle and breakable that she wants to choke back a cry every time their eyes meet.
it's his mouth that is ultimately her undoing. the bow of his lips slipping against hers like a fitting puzzle, tit for tat and mismatchedly messy in the same beat. sometimes she hears words get trapped in their mouths, strangled by heavy breaths and wanting sighs, encased with her slight giggle and the deep rumble of his chuckle.
his and hers. his and hers. his and hers.
(ours, he gasps on her naked shoulder, shivers down her spine.)
x
promises are made to be broken.
x
it's close to a hundred years of solitude and running before she lays eyes on him again.
he is still just as arrogant and unhinging as the day she left him watching her back in the forest. and still so damn everything that her words seem unable to describe what she wishes she could say. her tongue is the consistency of led and her feet are rooted to the cobblestone streets of Italy where she is more than certain that many a lover have stood in the dusky rose of the sun on the west gate of the ruins.
he registers her unmistakable fragrance—honey, lavender, vanilla. bores those bottle green eyes into her muddled watercolor blue and lightly hears her heart ratchet up at least three notches. she bolts sideways like lightning, legs like jelly and feet unsure through the wavering slips of light.
she knows not where she is going but she knows he'll find a way.
x
he finds her first this time in the city of love alone and achingly resplendent of lifetimes past, the golden curls showered down her naked back, eyes to the skies, porcelain skin kissed with summer and splattered with sun.
when she sees him, she does not freeze in place, does not run like hell far away to another unanswered corner of their world.
so he does instead, his feet carrying like bare flesh on hot coals, a hundred thousand regrets in his fingertips, uncountable lives lost in his hands, one woman's twice born virginity surrendered. he halts fleetingly in the wake of the seine, water colored ripples in the ivory.
her breath is on his neck, so close, he can taste her.
whiplash fast, he turns, she is already gone.
x
tokyo is huge and daunting but she is not so scared of anything anymore.
it is loud, deafening, she can barely hear herself think, but it is a blessing because her thoughts are decidedly less than pure, less than what girly little caroline, the one that read fairytales and cared about graduation and college and her future plan, had when she remembered her undoing with bark in her backside and scruff on her cheeks and him, hot and desperate between her legs and –
she is more than pleased that she can't hear herself, nor can anyone else.
the noise reaches a buzz that is unthinkably breaching to the point of where she wants to just stop and hold fast and firm. and then eyes open, a moment of silence in the shouting world. she doesn't have to wonder where it comes from, she knows.
and so she sprints. he won't be far behind.
x
the states are more spread out than she imagined. he still continues to follow.
they race all through the pacific northwest, dodging redwoods and smiling over coffee shop tables, frolicking through the Midwest fields and plains, blue bonnets wound in her hair and poppies trampled under his boots, running through the northeast, speckles of snow in his curls and icicles from her eyelashes.
she stops in Virginia for three days. the salvatores chastise her, barbs of sounds fall from their mouths, angry and jaded with the girl they love[d] and her see saw emotional rollercoaster. he guards from a safe distance in their wood, the leaves hushed with secrets, the trees stubborn with silent resolve.
x
he leaves her for the first time without looking back to see if she is coming. he should have anticipated she would always be one step ahead.
she has always been the only thing he didn't see coming.
x
it's not what she had pictured.
honestly, she feels a bit like Katherine, having him chase her all over the damn planet for six hundred and seventy two years. the only difference was Katherine never wanted to be caught. he's had her in his palm since she turned seventeen twice.
he finds her—naturally. lain prostrate with all limbs spread eagle on a grass spot near the east bank, those golden curls splayed out catching afternoon spring sun, too blue eyes wide awake and for once, not avoiding his gaze, rather blazing head on, ready for war. she looked at him in the way, that way, that he always wanted.
she rises up, reaches her jade ring finger and traces the scruff on his cheeks, the contoured bow and arrow of his lips, loses herself in his bottle green eyes, and kisses him with the weight of over half a century in her lips. her eyes ask the question. "ready?"
and he grins, snatches her fingers, already moving the sweet sea wind in their hair.
x
she is not someone to tame, rather he is someone for her to run with.