After the Fall (The Fallen Men 4)

Cressida

* * *

There were times King couldn’t sleep for the thoughts in his head. I would wake up in the dead of night to an empty bed knowing King was downstairs at the kitchen table, poetry-filled pages littered across the surface and the floor and ink staining the tips of his fingers and his mouth where he pulled at his lower lips as he thought.

He’d once explained to me that poetry wasn’t an art to him, but more like a compulsion, more like breathing than anything else, a necessary extension of himself. If he let those words build up, they congealed like soup in a cold bowl, thick and gelatinous in his head, stopping up all movement. It was only when he sat with a pen in his hand, blank paper beneath, that the words heated and flowed, spilling out the tip of the pen like blood from a vein.

I watched him from the base of the stairs the night before our wedding, back bowed, head tipped so his face was obscured by the thick, rumpled curtain of his hair.

“Can feel you in the room with me,” he muttered after a while, extending his left hand to me as he continued to furiously write. “Come here.”

I went to him, padding across the cool floor naked but for the shadows moving over my skin like silks.

Four years ago, I never would have walked naked through my house alone, let alone with my partner in it, and I never would have hopped up on the table, ass to King’s poetry, legs spread so I could prop the balls of my feet on his knees, exposed and aroused by it.

He was beautiful in the dark, illuminated only by the round, full moon beaming silver light through the windows to gild the ridges of his steep features in metallics. I traced a finger over his prominent cheekbone and tipped my head to the side.

“What keeps my poet up tonight?”

He stayed quiet, intensity brimming from him like a frayed electric wire. So, I picked up one of the sheaves of paper instead and softy read it aloud.

* * *

“I was born to the demons that hounded me.

They wanted my submission to their corruption like blood ink on paper signed with my name.

I could have run,

But where is the power in that?

Instead, I became a demon myself in order to master them all.

* * *

Own your demons.”

* * *

I looked up from the page, my heart burning like a coal stuck in the cavity of my throat.

“What’s going on, honey?” I asked again, threading my fingers through the curls and cowlicks of his golden hair.

I need to know the problem because whatever was stalking him, I would eviscerate. I wasn’t the woman I’d been before him, and I wasn’t the woman I was now just because of him. He was the flint that ignited the spark my soul needed to come into its own. I was strong enough now, if he needed me, to take on his burden, to fight those demons he spoke of in his poem. If he gave me the chance, I would fight and die for King…I just had to make sure if one of us ever had to be the sacrifice, it would be me and not him.

“Talk to me,” I urged softly, tugging at his hair.

But he didn’t speak. If anything, the static in the air increased, crackling over my skin, vibrating in the air between us.

He planted a hand in my sternum right between my breasts and up over my heart as he dipped his head to write another poem slanted across the bottom of a page already filled with verse. I read it upside down as he wrote and tried not to cry.

* * *

In whatever planes of existence there are

On any star or parallel planet

You and I are together

Infinitely

Inevitably

Because nothing makes sense

In any language or any place

Without our love to decode life’s purpose

* * *

There was some fierce formation moving through him, a weather system that could only be withstood and not evaded. He was an artist, a poet, a soul so tender and overfull with emotion that sometimes the only thing that could soothe it was a cleansing tempest rain.

So I stopped asking questions and only offered myself, my body and my spirit, to him by lying back on the poems scattered like dry leaves across the tabletop. He moved instantly, so powerfully I was almost frightened by his verve.

Not because he would physically harm me, but because there was such exquisite beauty to the words that spilled from the wounds he opened up within himself that I felt almost afraid of their grandness, fearful the way an acolyte might be facing their God.

He started at the base of my collarbones, the felt tip of his silver pen soft and ticklish against my skin as he swirled the words across my flesh. I fought to keep still and silent as he owned me with his prose. He punctuated the completion of each poem with a kiss to the place he ended it, lips pressed to the underside of one breast and the tip of the other, the hollow cast beside the peak of my hip bones and the jut of my pubis before it gave way to my sex.