Like a bulwark, he withstands the feeble abuse I dish out to him, either refusing to fight back or to acknowledge me. They felt like the same thing in the moment, as though I were the one drowning, fighting against our inertia to try and find our rhythm again.

It is not until I catch him by surprise, striking with hoof and teeth at the same time, that I am able to prompt a true reaction from him. Faster than I can respond, he snaps forward to grip my withers with his teeth, the placement a mirror of the mark he'd lain upon my skin that first night, when the whole world had belonged to us. A squeal erupts from me in surprise, and I can feel my ears lacing against my skin, my blood heating with an emotion I had not felt for many moons. Desire, wild and unpredictable, courses through my body; It is not the capitulation to duty, nor the gentleness of affection, but something deeper, wilder. The scrape of his hoof across my ribcage, jolts me back to the present and though the season had changed, I can feel myself responding to the desire of my Husband.

It had been so long since I had felt this way.

Not even with Nashira had my blood felt so heated. I had given myself willingly for our daughter's creation, had asked it of him even, but it had not felt like this. As though every nerve ending in my being were alive and sparkling, seeking and needing and taking in the same breath.

And then it was gone.

He was gone.

My heart faded, and was again replaced by the Sheik I had come to call Husband.

I want this. You. He proclaims and it takes all of my willpower not to snarl at him. The desire to do so is so foreign to me that I do not know what to make of it, only that his default back to words is infuriating in a deeply personal way. I stiffen again, drawing tight as he begins to make more proclamations, laying more rules and regulations about my shoulders, drawing the yoke of who we were tighter around us. More rules. More duties. More of what had already come between us. He implies that it is not enough for me to resent that he has made me small, but that I, in some way, have made him consider me small by admitting my own defeat as Mira.

It takes all of my willpower to not walk away from him in that moment.

"What desire?" I gasp out, ignoring all of the rest of the issues in his speech, all of the miscommunications that still plagued us. Later, we can discuss them. Later, when the loss of that passion was not so vividly in my mind, when my body wasn't crying out for him. The words jump out of my mouth with a life of their own, accompanied by hot tears of frustration that gather and fall. "I have to fight for any scrap of it-" I say, referencing our not-spat from seconds before, the spark of desire that had flared and then been snuffed out. "And then you bury it immediately."

My tail lashes at the still air, audibly cracking as I draw it across my body, leaving welts in its wake. "I do not want you to tell me, for Allah's sake Antares." Though it feels childish and petulant, I cannot stop a foreleg from lifting and striking down at the sand in frustration. I do not even know how he could do as I ask, but I cannot stop myself from asking. I want to feel that moment again, that catalyst that had almost, almost reignited just second before. "I told you to show me. Do you not know how anymore? Do you not know how to love me?"