How does anyone find a soul mate if we are all the same?
“What are you thinking about?” Elder turned to face me, his eyebrow raised and lips half tilted. The smile didn’t reach his eyes as if he’d placed himself behind prison bars and reached out to me behind them instead of giving me a key to join him.
I shook myself free from such runaway, unanswerable questions. “Nothing.”
“It was something.”
“Nothing important.”
“Your face looked as if you were trying to solve the world’s hunger issues.”
I shrugged, self-conscious that my mind had twisted into a tangent. “Nothing as important as that.”
He paused, his gaze searching mine, doing his best to pry apart my secrets. Slowly, his jaw clenched, and he placed his hand over mine on the balustrade. Licking his bottom lip, he whispered, “Are you happy?”
The question wasn’t something I expected. My eyes shot to his, wary, guarded, but beseeching him to let me steal his secrets. What had made him so uncertain that he had to ask? I was the happiest I’d ever been, and it was all thanks to him. My voice matched his in decibel. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I need to know.”
I should’ve put him out of his misery, but I answered his question with another. “What about what I need to know? What of that?”
His teeth ground together, understanding instantly what I hinted at. “Your theory?”
“Yes.”
Removing his hand from mine, he wrapped his fingers tight on the banister as if wishing it was my neck he wrung. He looked back at the port. His tall height gave him the advantage, blocking me from his eyes and deciphering his blustery moods.
He came across so forceful and unmovable—a true disaster in human form waiting to wreak havoc on anything and everyone, but now that I’d started looking…truly looking, I saw bone-deep pain beneath that rage. I tasted the soul-crushing hurt beneath his temper. And I felt the burning lust, not for bodily pleasure, but for the beauty of letting go entirely and falling.
Falling in love.
Falling in lust.
I understood more than he knew.
Perhaps that was what made me perfect for Elder where any other woman would pale? I’d been through my own trauma. I’d learned the darkest facets of myself and the lowest of lows. I knew what sort of human I was when faced with the purest of poison, and I knew how much I fought to survive.
Not many people knew the answers to those lessons—through luck of an easy life or lack of broadening horizons—but I knew.
I understood who I was in the worst of times.
I only needed to know who I was in the best of them.
Elder was like me. He knew how wrong he could be. How his flaws turned him from perfect to dangerous and just what happened when he let go.
He could never be normal, but unlike me, he didn’t catalogue everything he knew of himself as a strength. He looked at them as downfalls. He didn’t understand himself; therefore, he could never know how he could be in the best of times.
I want to show him.
I wanted a life where I grew into someone well-rounded and sexual and able to laugh at a stranger and not cower in the shadows. I wanted a dream where I held the hand of a man who others might call broken and kiss him without fear of his mind snapping or our trust breaking.
“I won’t push you, Elder. But I will know those answers…soon.”
“Not if I leave you here.”
My heart coughed. “Do you want to leave me here?”
My question was a pit full of sharp spikes ready to impale him. If he answered truthfully, he would be skewered with the knowledge I wouldn’t let him keep the walls up between us. And if he lied, he’d be lanced because I already knew he didn’t want to leave me.
He knew as well as I did the pain of being apart and the overwhelming feeling of wrongness when we weren’t by each other’s sides. Anything was better than that. Including being pushed by the one you didn’t want to push away.
He swallowed hard, glaring at the grey horizon. “You know I don’t want that.”’
The resounding agony in his tone restarted my heart into a rhythm entirely orchestrated by him. He might play the cello, but in that moment, he strummed my soul and sent the chords vibrating through me.
Pressing against him, I placed my hand over his, once again taking the initiative to touch and interact and speak. So long I’d been silent, and now I was a natural at conversing with him.
Him.
This man I wanted to be mine more than anything. “You know I won’t stop. If that makes me selfish and cruel…so be it. I’m doing it for other reasons than my own.”
His head hung. “I know.”