Falls

The playful response she gave made his smile grow, but her words that followed froze him to where he stood. Her eyes locked with his and Zevulun felt the world fall out from under him. The world around her became a hazed blur of cool, ethereal moonlit tones. Sabriel was kept in sharp focus - the way the silver light danced over her pale hair; how the dips of her feminine body were accentuated by the soft pale streaks contrasting against her dark coat; the elegant arch of her neck, where he suddenly ached to put his lips - and he was struck admiring her beauty.

Her meaning was not lost on him. The smile that held his mouth was almost wolfish; playfully predatory. “I think I might be able to find a way to convince you,” he said, his voice much lower than the soft, gentle tones he’d spoken with before. Now it rumbled from somewhere deep in his chest and his smile widened as he arched his neck and gravitated closer to her. It was as if her very aura and just the promise of touching her pulled him, Zevulun’s lips were the first to find her warm skin as he stretched his neck and began to fondly trace shapes along them.

“Mmm,” he hummed gratefully under his breath, whiskered lips settling near her ears, in the tuck of her neck behind her cheek. He kissed her there and teased softly back, “and I believe I’m going to have a lot of fun doing so.”

Here, alongside the very bank where they had first lay, strangers sharing their past regrets and finding something broken and beautiful within each other. Here, where their paths intertwined again on another faithful night beneath the moon and the stars. They would come together and create a piece of themselves, their heart’s as one. To raise, to cherish, and to protect.

Sabriel’s heart, her soul spoke to Zevulun in a way that was hard to put in words. Just this moment of being close with her, vulnerable with her, in her trusting him with something so precious as a heart already used to seeing such pain… meant so much to him. “I love you, Sabriel,” he sighed again in a warm breath into her ears, to confess it with nothing else left to say but that one truth. I love you.