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And sometimes it’s age in the face of youth. Or sickness in the face of health.

But sometimes it’s just because you’re looking into the eyes of your lover, and your gratitude for having them in your life overflows . . . because you showed them what was on the inside and they didn’t run scared or turn away; they accepted you and loved you and held you in the midst of your passion or your fear . . . or your combination of both.

Wrath closed his eyes and focused on the soft pulls at his wrist. God, they were just like the beat of his heart. Which made sense.

Because she was the center of his chest. And the center of his world.

He opened his eyes and let himself fall into all that midnight blue.

“I love you, leelan.”

In the Nature of Phury

posted August 15, 2006

This one was written after Lover Awakened as well, when Phury’s yearnings for Bella were at their strongest:

Over this past weekend I found myself alone in the house, pacing around. I was skipping over the surface of everything around me . . . not really tracking, roaming. Restless. I do this a lot, because I’m a high-strung nutcase and my head just chews on things practical and impractical until I think I’ll go mad.

In a Hail Mary move, I got into the car and opened the windows and the sunroof and cranked the bass: Sometimes our escape hatches have four wheels and righteous beats. And bless these chariots of relief.

When I took off, the sun was starting to set and I drove far, far from home. . . . I drove to the Ohio River and took the road that coasts along its bank. I’ve been doing this lately . . . just getting away, nothing but me and the car and the summer air and the music. The trees were black green overhead, a tunnel I followed with desperate hope that it could take me somewhere other than where I was.

It worked.

As I went along, to the left the sun was a big fat disk drifting down, like someone had hooked it and was trying to pull it out of the sky, but its inherent buoyancy was fighting the draw. Around me the air was so damned wet, thick as a cloud, smelling like . . . summer, really. And that sweet humidity coated my skin, and I liked what I was wearing when it was there.

Out there on the road life was sweet. Life was a precious gift, not the burden it can be sometimes. Life was the vivid mystery it should be.

And I found myself thinking of Phury.

Driving along, driving alone, driving out far from home . . . he followed me. Like he was in the car with me, elbow on the open window sash, the air moving all that hair of his around. I pictured his yellow eyes as the color of the setting sun, glowing like that, warm like that, beautiful like that.

Now, of course, he wasn’t with me. Would have been up in flames had he been. But he was in my head and looking out of my eyes and listening to what was around me. And he slid into my chest like a ghost and took up the space in my marrow and he assumed the wheel and the gearshift and the gas pedal.

And while he was with me, he spoke to me of the nature of the Do Not Have. The Cannot Have. The Never Possible.

The Unfulfilled.

I saw him sitting at the dining room table. Bella was across the way, across the china and the silver and the crystal, across the divide of the mahogany . . . across a million miles that would never be walked. He was watching her hands. Watching her cut her meat and switch the fork and knife back and spear the lamb and bring it to her lips. He watched her hands because it was the only remotely, socially acceptable option he had.

It is a special hell to want what you cannot have. Because his mind wanders. Takes him in directions he doesn’t want. Teases him with tastes he will never have on his tongue, curves he will never learn, feelings he can never, ever express.

He is trapped in his honor and his love for his twin, trapped also by his respect for Bella . . . a slave to his moral nature.

I think what makes it hardest for him is that she is always around him. He sees her every day.