I wake up from a dreamless sleep with a start. It takes me several moments to place where I am through the darkness of the room, where moonlight dimly filters in betwixt the window and the leaves of the tree outside. It casts monstrous patterns on the floor, and I do not like to look upon them. The candle I had put upon the bedside table had gone out, and the darkness creeps ever closer to me.
I told Ithilwë I would be fain to sleep alone. That I was prepared to return to my own bed after two nights at his side. Two nights in his arms where he held me until the nightmares fled from my mind. There is something I now realize as I lie awake, cold, in a room so dark that I am too frightened to close my eyes. I am never going to be ready to sleep alone.
For once I had a taste of that which I was so afraid of - for once I was not the savior, I was being saved. I was wrapped in arms warm and welcoming and told that I did not have to leave. I did not have to run. I was safe. I was home. There were fingertips that pressed into my skin and traced constellations across my scars; there were lips that murmured words into my ears and spoke to me things that I would not have believed had they come from the mouth of anyone else.
I grip the sheets on my bed tightly as I wince my eyes shut; I want to sleep and yet do not, for I want also to think. My eyes fly open once more to look at the canopy above my bed; the silk is silent and unmoving, unlike my own thoughts. They circle around my head like vultures, preying on the sleepless musings I had set aside, preying on the thoughts I try to keep buried at the back of my mind, because I am afraid of what will happen if I let them sit on my tongue.
I was at once the divine and the devout. I was worshipped with hands pure and unmarred. I was set ablaze with lips against mine; hands against my gilded neck that wipe away the gold dust from centuries of worthless praise, hands that cradle my face and smear their pure white on my cheeks like a diamond from the dirty coal. I press my lips to the skin of my beloved with the intensity of someone who would be incomplete without it; and in the moment that he tilts his head to the side to allow me unfettered access to the vulnerable parts of him, I remember something terrible that someone once told me.
“You are a romantic, Amathlan,” she had said with a laugh in what was once our home, before the war and the fire came; when I was still young enough to believe that love was mine for the taking, before I was old enough to realize that love takes me, and I do not decide to whom it belongs. How could I have known that centuries of battling dragons and gods who thought themselves greater would be nothing compared to the love which I feel now? That this, this, would be the death of me?
Because I felt starlight in my hair, weaving my strands of red flame around his fingers, and when I grazed my teeth longing against his neck and felt his sigh against my ear, I knew. Romantic, when she spoke of me then, did not mean lovely. She meant that I was relentless. That I give all of myself and hold nothing back; that when I fell in love, I was placing in the hands of whom I love a sword and begging them with tears in my eyes not to turn the blade on me, and knowing that even if they did decide to cut me open, I would grimace through the pain and say “I’m sorry,” even though it was my blood that stained the ground between us.
For there is nothing lovely about me. I am not sure there ever was. But I give all of myself and I feel that it isn’t enough; and that is why I find it easier to fall asleep with him.
My eyes are focused now.
I can see the dawn bleeding in to the room. I had not noticed it before. I was too frightened.
I do not fancy sleeping alone again. I find myself longing to be by his side, because when I am there, and his arms are around me, and he holds me close - he does not have to say it, but I know.
I know.
I am enough.
