Last night, while he was sleeping, she climbed beneath his skin.
She hadn’t meant to do it.
She was lying with her ear pressed to his chest, the thunder of his heartbeat rattling in her skull like rocks inside a tin can. She tried to breathe him in, the slightly acrid smell of his well worn t-shirt, the underlying musk of his skin, imagined the scent expanding inside her lungs to fill the leaden hollow that had lately settled in the pit of her stomach. Experimentally, she slid a hand beneath the sharp ridge of his ribcage, walked her fingers softly down his stomach. She was surprised to feel the flesh yield with little resistance.
There was a brief moment of panic when the skin knit closed behind her. She hadn’t considered how he might feel if he awoke, whether he’d welcome the new closeness or resent it as intrusion. She’d thought only of the wonder of it, the novelty. She drifted through his bloodstream like a leaf on a lazy river, the crimson-tinted darkness warm and inviting. It tasted like memory, and she let his childhood melt slowly on her tongue. She tread lightly through the pale autumn morning of his insecurities, lost herself in the lemon jazz mists of daydream, marveled and grieved alike at her place in the shrine of his passions. She wrestled with his intellect, and retired confused and enlightened to the illusory shelter of his ego. His singularity was a persistent melody played on a myriad of instruments. It whispered, cajoled, and threatened; it rushed and boomed until her head spun and she feared the loss of self that might result from further sojourn in this strange new Eden. Weary and overwhelmed, she climbed into a passing exhalation and allowed a murmured sigh to restore her to her place outside of him.
The next morning, she hadn’t known what to say.
He was as much a stranger as ever. She’d tried to explain it to him, and he’d laughed, fondly, raised her chin and kissed her in the manner of a playful child. She’d let the subject drop, unsure of what it meant anyways, unconvinced that it mattered, ultimately. They went to the farmer’s market and he bought her a box of strawberries, and they’d eaten at the restaurant on the corner, the one he always chose on Sundays. It was all as ordinary as it could be, and yet- there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind, a sense that she had misplaced something.
She was being silly.
But then, his eyes had always been brown before, hadn’t they?
