Wordsworth – Chapter 14

Reading is as sensual as it can be mental.

Opening an old book, the smell of aged paper and ink surrounding you, your fingers tracing the grooves in smooth leather, your eyes following the shapes of beautiful letters as meaning unfolds inside you… It can be intimate. Special.

“Taylor—!” Lisa protests before I dive down from our kiss to her neck, but her fingers run over my back, the slender, graceful tips gliding over my satin pages as words and ink part before her touch.

“Tay, I don’t—” she says as my own hands go beneath the wide, white shirt she hastily threw over her burned uniform, the entirety of her left side bare to my touch as I feel warm flesh and soft skin in a way that’s just so different from having her feet on my lap as she smiles and chats the night away.

“Taylor, Taylor…” I raise from her neck, from peppering kisses over her pulsing vein and feeling her heart race at my presence, my touch, my caresses, my… my everything that I can offer her.

And I kiss her once again.

Words over my lips keep them plush and tender, more than paper could or should be, and all of them are a poem, a sonnet of love, and beauty, and ecstasy.

‘Your mother was never religious, Little Owl, but… she liked these. They read a bit grown-up, and… It doesn’t matter. It’s about religion, but not the way your gran always went about it. It’s about the soul loving God, but a love that’s… It’s not impure, not really, but some can read it like that, and—I’m making a mess of this, aren’t I? Just… Take a look. If you ever want to pray for your mom, that’s how she would’ve liked you to think about it.’

‘Once in the dark of night,
Inflamed with love and yearning, I arose
(O coming of delight!)
And went, as no one knows,
When all my house lay long in deep repose.’

And I just did. I just went unseen through the city that’s now my home, walking in beauty, like the night.

Lisa shivers against me, and I take a step back. My arms are around her, but I don’t pull—I don’t dare to. No, I just move, my lips on hers slowly lessening their pressure until she follows my touch and something bursts in my chest.

‘Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined
Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!’

It’s old. It’s not as elegant as the words of Shelley, of Byron, of those who learned to wield the fire of humanity’s soul, its passion, but it’s still… Pure.

Beautiful.

And what I feel at the moment, as those words flit over my lips, caressing Lisa’s, as I feel us joining in a way I always hoped but never expected… This is what my mother thought prayer should be.

My embrace tightens until I feel her body flush with mine, and I lean back, pulling her up to me, shifting my grip to a bridal carry as I head to the sofa where she spent too many nights guiding a lost girl through a dark forest.

I sit with her atop me, with her warmth on my legs, on my shifting words.

And there are older words. There are words far older than a mystic yearning to be loved by God, words born of the woman whose name branded the kind of love I feel for Lisa.

‘and laughing delightfully, which indeed
makes my heart flutter in my breast;
for when I look at you even for a short time,
it is no longer possible for me to speak.’

And Sappho was right.

Because I feel her words swirling around me, yearning for Lisa’s touch, for her warmth, the weight of her body, but none of those words come to my lips as I feel myself lost in her, in the Beloved who remade my soul.

And I… I am words. It’s what I have. What I can offer.

But she’s so much more, so beyond the ghost of dying sound fading as it strives to reach another’s heart, so much more than I could ever—

“Stop,” she says, her hand in the middle of my chest gently pushing me away, delicately, exquisitely breaking my heart.

I stare at her, the words of love still around me as I—

“Not like this. Please, Tay. Not like this,” she tells me with clear pain in those trembling, green eyes I…

“Wh—what do you mean?” I manage to push out without a story or a poem getting tangled in my pain and confusion.

“It’s wrong. It’s so wrong you don’t even realize it’s wrong. I never could, never…”

And she cries.

Sitting on top of me, her body not moving away even as her hands rise to cup her face, Lisa cries.

And I…

I don’t know what to say, what to tell her that will make this right, that will fix whatever I’ve broken, so I…

I hug her.

And she leans into it, her heat once more seeping into far too cool pages, her scent mixing with that of ink and satin paper, her touch softer than any leather cover I ever admired with grubby fingers and a chiding mother not far behind me.

Lisa sobs against me, and I can only hug her and wait for her to tell me what it is that’s so wrong.

And hope and pray to a God that was made to love souls that the one thing that’s wrong isn’t me.

***

I’m sitting at her kitchen counter, a mug of steaming chamomile tea in front of me.

Lisa’s… across from me, on the other side of the white surface. Drinking red wine.

I’ve never even seen her touch alcohol.

“I usually don’t. My power gets a bit… flighty when I do. But I don’t want it focused for this conversation. I don’t want to have a power over it.”

I raise an eyebrow at that, unclear of both her meaning and the effectiveness of the wine seeing how easily she just read me—

“I know you. I know you better than anyone in this world can know you, and in some ways, I think I know you better than yourself. That’s… part of the issue, Tay.”

I cock my head and look at her, waiting for Lisa to take a sip of the burgundy liquid.

“You knew I was in love with you, then,” I finally say, reaching the obvious conclusion.

She massages her temples with her right hand, her elbow leaning on the counter as her left keeps swirling her cup, casting red shadows below her.

“Of course I did. How could I not, Tay? How could I not see you fixating on me, thinking I was some kind of… of extraordinary girl who deserved all your devotion and affection? How could I not see you twisting around that idea, thinking that you owed me—”

“I do. Whatever else comes out of tonight, you can’t take away the debt I owe you.”

She stares at me for a single second, something flashing across dark emerald that scares me in a way I don’t understand.

“Tonight, you freed me from Coil. That debt, whatever it may have been, is settled.”

“Tonight, I almost let you die. That’s not how—”

“Damn it, Tay! No! That’s not on you, not when I could’ve done so many things differently and not end up in Emma’s—”

She stops.

She never yelled at me, before.

And that’s part of why my fingers are tight around the chamomile mug, part of why I’ve stopped breathing, stilled like a closed book.

Part.

“You need to accept it,” she mutters.

“Never,” I answer.

“Tay… I’ll never forgive her. I’ll still kill her if she tries to hurt you. But you can’t erase what happened just because it doesn’t fit what you want the world to be like—”

“What I wantthe world to be like? I want a world where my best friend, my sister, didn’t become a crazed monster, a world where they didn’t come for me and… and changed me, a world where… where you love me…” I start indignant, cutting her off with a sharp tone.

It doesn’t end like that.

Silence stretches between us in a way it never did before. Not when we shared so many unseen things, when I could trust she would…

“I can’t,” she says, and I find out I had gone back to breathing when I let out a pained gasp.

And I look at Lisa. At her staring down at the swirling wine in the glass cup with the thin stem fashioned like a flower’s. At her refusing to look at me.

“Why?” I manage to ask.

Her eyes don’t rise to meet mine.

“Because… Because it’s wrong.”

“But why? Why is it so wrong to love me? Is it because they… they turned me into this—”

“No! No, God, Tay, don’t ever—no, please, it’s not about that! Please, you have to understand—”

“Then explain it to me!” I slap the counter, stronger than I should, the sound like wood on wood, and I can feel the words in my eyeshadow itching to run down my face in black rivulets to the tune of a sob I desperately hold back—

“Because I love you!” she yells, frantic, her hands on mine, her cup set aside, the wine still swirling with the sudden motion after she set it aside.

I look at her hands, at the white, long fingers lying over black words tightly packed together.

I breathe deeply, my chest straining at the movement, and I take them away, my gloves melting into my dress until her flesh is on my paper, until they no longer look white as true monochrome show how much color they have. How much life.

“What does that even mean?” I ask her, finally looking at surprised eyes that don’t know whether to flee my own.

“I…”

She shuts up.

Lisa shuts up.

I almost feel like laughing.

Instead, I clasp her right hand and get up, walking around the counter until I stand in front of her, almost near enough to touch her and close enough to feel her heat once more seeping into my cold.

She follows my eyes all the way, not looking away even once as her mouth contorts in all the emotions she wants to show and all the ones she wants to hide.

“There once was a clever fox. Like all foxes, it prided herself on the tricks she could play, the people she could fool.

“But the fox was too clever, and the people around her too slow, so the tricks stopped being funny. The fox felt alone.

“So she thought, ‘What if I fooled myself? Wouldn’t that be the greatest trick a fox could play—‘”

“It wasn’t like that, Tay,” she protests, but the story is on my lips, and I don’t have the strength to stop it.

“‘What if I lied? If I played at being what I’m not? What if I decided to hide things until I didn’t know where they were anymore? What If—‘”

“What if I just didn’t want to hurt you?”

There’s anger in her voice.

I’d rather she be angry than cry.

“The fox decided to go ahead. She hid pieces of herself, but she was too clever, and so she always knew where they were, what they were. She felt them missing, even as she felt them too close to ignore—”

Her nails dig into my paper, creasing it.

“Stop,” she mutters.

“And then the lost girl—”

“The fox madethe lost girl! Don’t you understand?! Don’t you get how much power I hold over you, how much I’ve twisted you to suit my—”

“The lost girl who had always admired the fox saw how silly the fox could actually be. How, in trying to be noble, she was only hurt.”

“That’s not it at all!”

“Because the fox thought herself cleverer than she was. She thought she could do things she couldn’t. She thought she could make the girl love her, when love, the kind of love the girl felt—”

“Taylor, listen to me, you don’t really lo—”

My hand goes around her nape, and I drag her to me into a kiss that drains the tension out of her shoulders, that lingers as she melts against words not of devotion and religious fervor, but tenderness and affection.

Of acceptance.

Because…

‘Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds.’

She’s crying.

Once more, I kiss Lisa. And she cries.

But she doesn’t pull away, not when I don’t think about her as the one who rescued and shaped me, but as the imperfect, frail girl who thinks her mind is more powerful than it really is, who thinks she holds over me things she doesn’t, who makes so many silly, terrible mistakes.

She doesn’t pull away as long as I think her human.

And the poor, silly fox will need time to learn that… That those are not two separate things. That I see a love in her higher than I had hoped to find after I was first betrayed and abandoned, that her beauty is to me something that points at a truer beauty, at something everlasting and sacred.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t love the human Lisa. The one who makes silly faces when listening to one of my stories, the one who smiles a triumphant, smug thing whenever she coaxes a foot rub out of me, the one who’s never as witty as she wishes she could be in the early morning.

She saved me, rescued me, put me back together, pushed me to be myself. And for that, I’ll always be grateful, always know how kind and noble she is—sometimes despite herself.

But gratitude is not love.

And the crying girl in my arms? The one who wants to push me away because she fears herself? The one who doesn’t realize just how deeply she insulted me with her worries? The one who would deny both of us this perfectly imperfect moment?

That’s… That’s the girl I fell in love with.

And…

There’s one last thing.

I pull away, just enough that our lips brush rather than blend, and she opens her eyes to look tremulously up at mine.

“Lisa… It’s true love. It doesn’t happen every day.”

She blinks, taking a moment to remember the time we cuddled on her couch, watching a marvelously corny, smart movie that was also an incredibly witty book, part of me comparing all the little and not so little differences as I enjoyed the tale of adventure, pirates, fencing, revenge, and true love.

And her tearful, lost face breaks into a surprised smile as she laughs and keeps on laughing as I hug her to my chest.

And the world is all right. As long as my Lisa laughs, the world is all right.

Because Westley was right.

It doesn’t happen every day.