Burning Out

75- endless love*

Song— Kiss It Better by Rihanna

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Lips on lips. Breaths on breaths. Everything that our kiss consists of is a blur of a mess and that mess is beautiful.

It fills a craving my soul was aching for, it fills the hole that was itching at me from the inside and repairs the claw marks that were made as it scratched to the outside of my body.

But that one hint of sadness and doubt that refuses to budge still sits at the back of my mind. Even when his hand rests on my jaw, when his arms loop around my back, when his lips break from mine and a heavy sigh passes through them.

"Farrah," he says in a whisper.

I push my head forward and peck the brightness of his lips, savouring the feeling of them against my own.

With that as my nonverbal answer, he opens his mouth to speak again. "I love you."

So foreign, so fragile. I rest my forehead against his and smile. It's small and faint but it's most certainly there.

I glance back up to him, my eyes falling straight to his lips. I kiss them after the unswayable urge crashes into me.

Quickly, I loop my arms around his neck and he ducks his head back down to kiss me again.

Lips on lips. Breaths on breaths. Everything that our kiss consists of is a blur of a mess and that mess is perfect.

It's like his words were never there. It's like they're a figment of my imagination that consists of an eerie echo in the back of my mind. But they were there, they definitely were there. I heard them with my own ears and I watched his mouth form the delicate syllables.

I heard them, I watched them, I felt them.

And then our feet are moving backwards. I'm blind and it's not even due to the fact that my eyes are closed. We're moving in a direction foreign to my awareness, spinning my mind to confusion. Leo grips me and walks us back until our body as one collides with a door.

His mouth dives deeper to mine, stretching across what feels like a vine covered in thorns. It feels like there's a rose, a beautiful rose with ripe petals that flash a rich red, but it feels so far out of reach.

We were there once, we saw this rose face to face. I touched this rose, held this rose, but then my fingers slipped and my grip loosened and I fell down the stretch of thorns, cutting my skin along the way.

I dragged Leonardo down with me and now we are collectively working to climb back up, despite the pricks getting lost beneath our flesh.

He kisses me and his hand threads into my hair, knitting his fingers through the strands. His touch is soft and delicate and his lips are the same.

"I missed you," he breathes, heavily pushing out the word with a force for it to pass through his lips.

I break away and rest my head against the door behind me, gazing up into his shining eyes like I'm lost in a trance. This moment feels like it's locked in a glass box; it feels like we are completely exposed and yet still somehow entirely secure.

"I've never missed someone as much as I missed you," I admit.

Pathetic, it seems. We were apart for twenty days. Twenty days is less than three weeks.

But when you become the same person, when words become more than just a collection of letters, when a single touch turns from a feeling to a fire, when stars become more than just a sparkle in the sky, when beams of sunlight no longer just provide light, when alcohol stops being a coping mechanism, when Paris is no longer just a city, when home is no longer a place but now a person; that's when twenty days becomes a lifetime.