Take My Body + Nino

IT'S BEEN A WHILE since I could look Nino in the eyes. We've kept a distance from each other since that last day we collided on the street - a chasm, twice as deep as the spaces he digs up coffins in - was built between us as a reminder of what losses we've cut and how no amount of ruined soil or shattered deals can fill in the gaps, again. (Oh, but we can sure as hell try.) Awkward glances exchanged between the counter - bartering between our worth, an unspoken deal, and a couple of coins whose weight feels lighter than it used to be - and words swelling like a suppressed flood in my throat, rising like a wave to the tip of my tongue until the ocean recedes back into the chasm again, leaving the shore dry and waiting for more.

His absence, I convinced myself, made me want closure. Made me want to sew in stitches where I'd severed limbs, made me want to drain the oceans out of my lungs so I could breathe again in his presence without a heartbeat that rivaled the pulse of an earthquake. I wanted to see Penelope's ocean without feeling the familiar salty waves rise in my own eyes, I wanted to hear a ghost story without my trembling lips suppressing the story of a girl I knew who was an actual vessel for ghosts. When I walked down the street, the clang of metal of a construction project down the road made my mind flicker to four familiar brothers, whose dust encrusted hands held badly hidden spades and shovels that used to regularly thump against the woodwork of a cracked coffin. My life for this past year has been a never ending burial - just one more throw of dirt over my coffin over another.

Except, the bright lights and the bad dancing and the loud music and Nino's hand resting right above my waist, that, for some reason, keeps my tongue stumbling over words no matter how many times I tell myself to ignore his touch remind me I'm not another corpse in another coffin. My feet refuse to collapse no matter how many times I've tried to fracture them; my bones are too strong of a structure, with ligaments built from years of sticky deals, to demolish. I'm not dead, yet, and maybe by the time I am, I want to actually be something worth digging up.

"How'd you know it was me?" He asks, before his mouth contorts to an embarrassed smile and he flickers his gaze between his cast (truthfully, I didn't even notice it) and the stars to the point where I'm sure that if I raised his mask, I'd find a blush spreading his features. My lips curl up in what must be a smile (I don't remember it ever feeling this sweet), finding it silly that he would think I wouldn't be able to recognize him any either way. I know the beat of his footsteps like how writers can recite their favorite poem - the way he erects his spine, or how he turns his neck, or the rhythm of his steps when he walks into the pawnshop (in order to successfully avoid something, you must familiarize yourself with it first).

The question brings me back to the night he threw rocks at my window (it sounded like rain, but I wish he'd brought hurricanes instead of drizzle). At first, I thought it was Learna's ghost, but then I saw him hiding in the shadows through the window, his chest heaving unevenly with distorted and panicked breaths between each throw. Maybe hurricanes could pacify the guilt that paralyzed my hands and body for not unlatching the window and letting him in. Maybe it'd numb the wounds that opened at the disappointment of seeing Nino instead of my sister's phantom. In the end, it never really mattered, because I already knew what he wanted, but I wasn't made for kissing away anyone's scars, especially not when I could hardly even look at my own. I went to bed with a pillow tightly pressed against my ears in a sick attempt to muffle his hyperventilated breaths that seeped in through the cracks of my bedroom walls. I don't remember falling asleep, but I must have, because I woke up with the traces of a deal lingering on my lips and an ache in my chest I was only sure he could fill. It was an equation, always a formula defining the mathematic relationship between us, that if I let him in, and he kept it a secret, we would have a deal.

I woke up when the sun rose, my foot steps as silent as I was last night, sure that once I swung open the back door his body would be there, shivering, curled up, and asleep on the steps - like so many times I've seen him do before. He'd be there, waiting for me, he always was.

"I didn't. I just knew I was missing something." I raise my gaze to his eyes less fearfully this time, a burning sensation running through every part of my body that he touches.

We whirl into the street, and into the chasm that's divided us for so long. My head dizzies from the white lights pouring into my vision, and from the intoxication of having him so close to me after a year, where even brushing the ends of my fingers against his palm to exchange stolen goods for coins, hurt. It still does hurt, now, but at the same time, I feel even if we were pressed so close together that our lungs would collapse from the pressure, we still wouldn't be close enough, and maybe I'm just beginning to realize why that is so.

"My mother taught me how to dance, she used to tell me that someday it'd be the reason someone would fall in love with me." His gaze droops at the words, but his grip around me tightens, and that fire that began to stir within me from the beginning of this party starts to evaporate the seas of salty water in my lungs, until it's almost necessary to gasp for air at his touch. Almost. "Your other hand," he starts again, "it belongs here." He points to his shoulder with the hand in the cast, and, gently, I place my palm on the directed spot. I'm aware of every atom or molecule where our touch meets - on his shoulder, on my waist, in the electric static gaps between our eyes and our lips.

It's been a while since I could look myself in the eye, and what I'm beginning to find is that, even though I want to hate Nino Ripley for not being there, asleep on my porch, on that morning, I'm still glad he could be here tonight.

"So, you're teaching me how to dance, tonight, Ripley. Do you think it'll help in any case of love in my life?"

I WOULD BE LYING if I said I never wished for someone to kiss away the scars on my arms.

For the past two years, my mind has been diluted of its better judgment from the spilled ichor of my two sisters, and I'd wake up with scars indented on my wrists the same way drunks wake up in a stranger's bed, not remembering how they got there. But, lips don't heal any better than blades do, and anyone kissing my raw scars would just bloody themselves in the process. I've grown fragmented, and the veins in my rest withered like the roots of a dead tree. At first, I was sure the scars were a way to substitute guilt for a self-inflicted punishment - the iron graze against my virgin skin became my own personal jail, and I was just doing time. But then, the scars started to sting a little less, the guilt evaporated from my skin a little more, and even my flesh became numb to the purgatory I condemned it, and myself, to. I was scratching at a hollow body, that felt nothing, thought nothing, saw nothing - until the carvings on my wrist weren't even enough to fuel the storm, and I might as well belonged six feet under between Pen and Learna. I was more dead than they were.

My life has been as dry as their graves, without substance or fervor, and the absence of Nino's hurricanes only left me in a drought. Since the last time we held each other this close to today, I sought futile ways to tug at the strings in my core to conjure up what storm might be left inside of me. But, my wrists lost its violent pulse years ago, and sometimes, I wonder if I even had one to begin with.

The hurricane boils again tonight, though, leaving my insides whirling with every spin and graze of Nino's fingertips against the light chiffon fabric around my waist. We dance like our footsteps are blue printed - a cautious outline, just in case we trespass a territory leading us back to tight lipped silence and wavering eyes seeing anything but each other. Those borders loom over our heads, almost as close to us as are bodies are to each other. The faded, pale pigments of leftover scars on my wrist pulsate with a rhythm too fast for even our calculated footsteps to keep up with, and if I knew I could recapture this flood within me just by leveling my hands on Nino Ripley's shoulders, I probably would've kissed him months ago.

I would make any deal just to have the tsunami sweep me away, again, from the numbing outline of the shore. I've been buoying in a blank atmosphere for so long now, that who knew how much a pair of air-dried lungs could miss the sweet burn of seawater flooding it?

"If it's possible for men to fall for the same girl twice," Nino says, with a look in his eye that makes the hurricane between us churn even more, "I wouldn't be surprised if it were for you."

He says twice as if there has ever been a first, and maybe there has been, because - even though I don't remember feeling this storm whirl inside my stomach just at the touch of his hand - it sure as hell feels familiar.

If, however, men were ever so fortunate to fall in love with me the first time, I'd like to know what kind of deal I conjured up with him to make me fall in love a second. I've witnessed this myth firsthand, the way my father reaches out for the comfort of any woman other than his wife, and how my mother strokes the frame of a mirror more than she does her own children. Love kills you, slowly and painfully, and any fool who decides to fall into its trap a second time deserves his own death.

I've never been stupid enough to fall in love, no matter how many kisses I've seized from lips whose eyes I can't remember, but as Nino slips his hands back around my waist, and presses his own lips against the shell of my ear - "Back, two, three, forward, two, three," - I feel I'm coming dangerously close to it.

"Careful," he warns me, until only my fingertips are grasping his, and I twirl out before him, before he reels me back in, a smile on his lips as he tucks a strand of my stray hair back behind my ears. "Don't let go my little Libertine. One, two, three."

When his hand returns to my hips, I hear an undeniable earthquake roar in my ears, but the dance floor is still intact as we seamlessly glide over it. I'm out of my element (I'm not used to having sweaty palms or faltering voices or butterflied stomachs), and no one, not even Nino Ripley, is allowed to beat me at my own game.

"Your little Libertine?" I ask him, an eyebrow raised and a smile mirroring his. We dance through the sea of entangled limbs and masked faces, parting through it as a captain commands his ship (only, we're both struggling for that position of captain). In a voice laced with mock hurt, I raise my right hand from his shoulder to skim the back of my fingers from the corner of his lips to the edge of his mask, slowly and painfully, and say, "Why, Nino, did you already forget that tonight is a night of pretend?" I let my hand linger for a second longer beneath the end of his mask, my eyes gleaming behind my own pearled one, before returning it back to his shoulder. That storm inside my stomach and the earthquake in my ears thunder even louder than before, and, if tonight was a tsunami, then I willingly allow this dance to carry me away into its waters. "Nothing about me is little." I lower my voice into a whisper, as if what I was about to say was a secret, and I could trust him to take my words to the grave. "Tonight, we are giants."

What fools we both are for playing in such treacherous waters as these. After all, any fool who falls for love deserves his own death.

OUR DANCE WAS DRIFTING into an endless existence, a transient play on smiles and sharp words that cut deeper than the blades that cut scars on my wrist. We cannon truths coated in smiles against each other, over an ocean blackened by the blood of our lost ones, but our ships are made of steel, and it doesn't seem like either of us will be sinking anytime soon.

Everything Ripley says either makes me want to slap him or kiss him - "Don't worry, I haven't forgotten for even a single second that tonight is pretend," - as if he spoke like he was trying to shed my layers of skin to reveal something about me I didn't know before. As if I never saw the caution dance in his eyes when he met mine, as if I never noticed the hesitance in his smiles when I directed one towards him. I am a deceptive, manipulative, and damned bastard, and if he for even a single second tries to make me realize something I already praised and hated myself for, then, like this dance, his words were drifting into nonexistence.

He's as stubborn as a storm with his words, but so am I. And maybe that's why our bodies mold together so easily like the withered and entwined hands of an old couple. And maybe that's also why I want to untangle my jungle of limbs away from his, and pull myself closer all the same. I'm grasping at nothing but a boy who'll see me as nothing more than a deconstructed brick wall of deals, but, tonight, I'm not quite done with the reconstruction of that faltering building.

"That's why we can be giants," he continues, "just because you say so." It's so easy to flit my eyes across a dance floor of uncoordinated bodies and see them as something miniscule, something to easily dismiss, when at the touch of Nino's hand, my body swells larger into something that can't possibly ever belong to me. "It's also why I can say mine, although we both know that isn't true."

His words plaster against my own mind, leaving a sticky imprint that won't wash out with boiled water or bars of soap. Being owned, physically or even abstractly, was something I've never been good at, a deal I hardly ever wanted to shake on, and Nino's claim on me creates an involuntary reflex that puts another of the thousand barriers between us, even though our chests are still pressed against each other and I can feel the flutter of his heartbeat against my own. But, even then, the rush of blood in my cheeks and slight crinkle of my eye make me wonder what it would feel like to hold him in my arms everyday, and not just for a fleeting night.

"If tonight is a night of pretend, then impossible things like that are allowed to happen." He almost sounds like me, and I already know how bitter the next words on his tongue will taste, and yet my ears are still eager to recognize the familiar formula escape his lips. "So Ursula, be impossible with me." (Maybe not as impossible as you think, Ripley, because tonight, I am teeter-tottering over the precipice of my own wanton desire for independence and self-righteousness between my wistful desire to be held in arms that might even be more scarred than mine.)

"I'll be your giant, if you'll be mine."

(Foolish Ripley, an amateur in the art of deal making. Shouldn't he know that a deal like that will inevitably lead to me being his downfall, and him mine? And yet -)

"That's a deal I can't refuse, Ripley," I say, my lips curling into a venomous and all too familiar smile it hadn't felt in years, "But, only on one condition." It should scare me how much he's beginning to sound like me, how much faith he's lost in redeeming the girl of his idealistic infatuation that he doesn't even bother to wash her hands away of their sins anymore, how much I'm even dipping them back into their bloody origins instead of holy water, how much I smile in this dance even though I've grown to recognize the beats of hesitance before his, and how much I'm beginning to feel like he does - or used to - about me.

"If I pretend to love you, you'll pretend to love me."

But, the scariest of all is how much I don't care about any of that, as long as this dance keeps drifting.

EARTHQUAKES USUALLY DON'T LAST for longer than a minute, but I swear, this one's been shaking for hours. The last time the ground beneath our feet trembled so violently was the day Learna died, but my scars have fooled themselves into healing since then.

But, saying there's an earthquake is just an optimistic way of me naming the recklessly spongy feeling in my knees when Nino's voice brushes the shell of my ears - "That's the way Libertine, now you're talking impossible." - or those goose bumps that weigh me down like mountains when he cradles me close to glide across the dance floor. (It's an earthquake, it's an earthquake, it's an earthquake - ) I'll say it to myself backwards and forwards if it meant I could convince myself that, too, and it probably wouldn't even take that much convincing. Earthquakes and disasters, I've never known anything otherwise. After a while, it's hard to differentiate between the two.

"What's the penalty if one of us doesn't follow through? How about your real heart." I'm almost sure I don't have one, anymore, other than a withered organ crumpled between my water logged lungs. But, this earthquake somehow made it flutter again, even if for just one beat. For a second, I'm almost scared Nino can feel it rasp for oxygen from my chest against his own, but then I remember that he stopped feeling things a long time ago, too.

Maybe that's why our dance resonates in the friction of two colliding continents, struggling for dominance over the other in a tragedy masked by a foolish game of words. The earthquake only lasts as long as the pent up tension floods between us, but, if that were the case, I'm not sure it'll ever stop.

"If you can't keep up with pretending, then I get to keep it." His words are silly, almost like he forgot who he was talking to - I always make good on my deals - but what's even sillier is the kisses he presses onto my wrists, as if his lips were a vaccine for pain, and not just a drug that fueled my addiction to things that hurt (like him)

It's true that when babies are born, a garden of untamed flowers spurt from their scalp - stems and petals growing along their hair lines. Grown ups are supposed to cultivate those gardens, sow the seeds of their curiosity and figments of their imagination. Those petals and stems represent truth, but the world is an ignorant place, and without hesitation, we destroy what we make. As we grow, the soil no longer harbors the strength to maintain curiosity or imagination, and, in turn, we grow fragile and withered to the bone, and break at any ounce of truth that weighs down upon us.

Nino Ripley's skeleton is breaking before me, and his teeth clatters with the pain of pronouncing sharp truths that cut wounds upon the surfaces of his lips and tongue. I've kissed lips of boys whose mouths never uttered such sweet sorrows like Nino's does, and I never worried about handling their words with care, before, in the same way I struggle between grasping at every syllable Nino pronounces or letting their meaning disintegrate before me. When other boys whispered breathless "I love you"'s, it was easy to kiss them because I knew they weren't telling the truth - because, that way, we were both just a pair of fools with flowerless heads. But the cracks in Nino's skull harvests dozens upon dozens of flowers, no matter how many times I try to dig them out.

"You already know there isn't anything good left of me, you'll just end up with the worst of what I have." The truth weighs down upon us both, because even if what he said was true, I can't help but feel that I might still want what he has to offer anyway. "Besides, it's not robbery if I give it to you. Go ahead. Take my grave, it's yours."

It's weird to think there was once a time where the theft of graves was not used as a topic to bypass small talk - in a time where my words were harmless and the Ripleys were whole and our families were not as broken as the deals I'm making today. Back then, truth was never supposed to be something to fear, it was supposed to be embraced. Since when did "Penelope, I love you," and "Learna, you look like a princess today," stop becoming a regular part of my vocabulary? Since when did the truth become trickier, since when did the truth elude my grasp? I wished words could come as easily as it did then, so I could say, "It's not really robbery if what I take is already mine, either." But, I've never been good with the truth, and why bother mentioning something Nino already knows?

"Whatever you want from me, my little Libertine, tonight - tonight, it's yours." At his words, I rest the palm of my hand over the spot where I can feel his heart beating. I leave it there and count his pulse, wanting to know if it's racing fast enough to jump right out of his ribcage and run the hell away from me before I can touch it - because, if what he says is true and I already know it is

The paradox of life is that we are both living and dying at the same time. Every ironic breath our lungs dare to inhale is just another shoveled pile of earth that we unconsciously dig for our own graves. Our mesh of cells that weave over our skeletons are decaying in the process - an atlas of endless stars and supernovas spurring into uncapped black holes. I don't know if I believe in God, but what kind of asshole would sentence an eternity of souls into fully knowing the damnation that awaits them in 100 years time, or less? Considering our circumstances, Nino and I might as well be dancing corpses tonight, because his tortured look reminds me of how much more dead than the graves of our siblings we both are.

He tears away his mask as if he could tear away the deal we just sealed, and stubbornly hauls me through the crowd, toward the back staircase in the pawnshop. Half of me wants to resist the sudden upheaval of emotion that's begun to drive him away and toward me at the same time, somehow, yet I allow myself to be pulled higher and higher until he abruptly stops.

When he tells me he needs me to listen, I do.

Time doesn't freeze, but I swear I hear the hands of a clock stir backwards in their mechanical bonds. Slowly, I can hear the edges of my fingertips graze the baby-haired fibers of his shirt, the static electricity itching between us as I let him hold me so close against the wall that my lungs forget how to inhale, the way his breath hitches when his lips make contact with the skin of my temple, the pulse of the music outside as it vibrates through the cold plastered wall my bare shoulders are rammed against, the rippling clatter of my mask as it falls against the ground without any of us giving it a second thought - I hear it all, I listen until my ears are imploded with the universe and the rasp of his breath. "You make me miserable, you know." Involuntarily, I shudder as he retracts himself away from me, the warmth leaving my body with him, and he walks away without me onto the rooftop of the pawnshop. His last words - "But I'm worse without you." - leave a metallic aftertaste in the air, almost as if I tasted iron blood, and I might as well have been. I already knew it since we first started dancing, tonight, that Nino Ripley was bleeding because of me.

The benefits of knowing you will die one day is realizing that no one will care how many hearts you broke once your coffin is nothing but filled with the dust of your marrow and bones. The benefits of knowing is that there are no benefits - and I can end up breaking more hearts than deals, and justify others' tears with the comforting knowledge of knowing they won't be able to cry in their graves.

A lethal dose of adrenaline and anger mixes within my veins, and with heavy footsteps and clenched fists, I follow him out into the night, where cold zephyrs and dull music drift as close to me as Nino has just done in the hallway or on the street - closer than he is to me now, anyway. I don't even know why I'm angry, maybe because the lack of distance between us makes me want something that I'm not sure Nino can give (and I'm not entirely used to not getting what I want), but I stopped needing a reason to be angry a long time ago.

"All I do anymore is fight," I glance at his hand bound in a cast, which he holds up as evidence, and imagine the boy I just danced with regularly covered in scars and bruises. I wonder how many of them were because of me. "I go out looking for guys to throw their fists in my face, to break my bones. One of them busted my nose a few months back — did you know?" He asks questions as if I had answers, but my mouth grows vacant of words, and it's almost as if I've already died and he's already groveling at my grave.

"I just wanted somebody to touch me. Even though I know they're nothing like my mom or my dad or Fitz or Noah or Jude," he says, until my overdue and suppressed guilt slowly unravels my core, and I'm almost shaking as hard as he is. I know loneliness like an old friend, but he lives in it as a storm, and it's only so long until he can weather it any more. "It felt kind of nice in a really fucked up way, to have somebody reach out to me, even if it was just to beat the crap out of me. But I figure, if I'm going to fight with someone - if I'm going to let anyone ruin me - shouldn't it be you?"

A tumorous silence sears before us, and I almost threaten the sanctity of his confession by poisoning it with my own. He couldn't find refuge in me even if I had any, not when I'm fighting battles, too. But, when I open my mouth, he cuts off my almost-threat to another year condemned of awkward looks and loud silences by saying, "Don't say anything." My immediate obedience silences me, but keeps my fists between a constant and agitated state of clenching and unclenching.

When he tells me to listen, I do, and all the matter and atoms and weight in the universe fill my ears with such a sweet melancholy that it makes his next words sting just a little bit less than they should.

"I know you're not a nice girl, Ursula. For a long time I didn't and I thought your soul must be as gorgeous as your face, but it turns out you're a pretty ugly person." The laughter that elicits from his lips claw at my core, shattering me as much as every syllable I ever even pronounced to him, before, shattered him. His words broke that esteemed mirror he carried my adored reflection in - his innocent infatuation finally corrupted by the damned realization that I'll always take more than I'll give - and maybe the shards of it could form the true sea monster beneath.

"You're mean and sometimes I really fucking hate you for it." Every goddamn word is a missile toward my defenseless boundaries. The smile that gently tugs on my face is as insincere as his words are sincere, and, again, I'm torn between hating this boy for knowing such awful truths or loving him for speaking them. I guess Nino Ripley, above all else, would know best about simultaneously hating and loving someone, though, wouldn't he? "I haven't done much else for the past I-don't-even-know-how-many-months, except hate your guts." Finally, he stares at me as if I have just murdered him, when, actually, I've done much worse. I raise my chin in a wobbly defiance, preparing for the worst.

"After a while it was easy to pretend that was all there was, but I couldn't hate you like that if you didn't mean so damned much to me." My jaw clenches and I'm scared I might start crying, but, instead, I back away a few miniscule steps, desperately aching for time to make myself stop shivering at the cold looks he's giving me. (I'm not used to not getting what I want, I'm not used to not getting what I want, I'm not used to -)


"Don't get me wrong. Someday when you die, I'm going to spit on your grave . . . But then I'll dig it up and cry over your bones. I'll miss the bruises you gave me and the way you smell. How you sound cruel every time you say my name, even when you're trying to play nice. Your hair when it falls loose." He steps closer toward me, the sound of his footfall echoing in my ears like a hurricane. His fingertips ghost the side of my face as he tucks a few strands of hair behind my ear, and he lets his hand linger there for a moment before smiling. I don't return it, but my gut wrenches with a feeling I'm scared I won't be able to loose. "Your footsteps when you walk away," he continues gently, "getting quieter and quieter, but never really falling silent, just far."

He steps away from me, and I begin to realize that our roles of five minutes ago have reversed. As if he were a wave, he pulls in close to me only to recede further and further away, leaving me empty handed and wanting more every time. I'm awful for thinking it, but I'm not even sure if I want him to love me, again, in the way I don't know if I could ever reciprocate, but I do know I want him to stay, even after I break him time and time again.


"I'm not a nice guy either. In fact, I'm kind of a spectacular asshole these days, but I love you anyway and you're a goddamned liar whenever you pretend not to know it." When he says this, I bite my lip to hold back a small smile (because, at this point, only an asshole like Nino Ripley who's as messed up as I can make me waver between crying and smiling in the space of only 20 goddamn seconds), but he sways toward me again and leans in a breath away, "I wish you wouldn't do that."

I wish he'd let me speak, pause long enough for me to decide between holding him or walking away - which, in any case, both would cause the same amount of damage in the end. But, he continues unfiltered, without warning, and my tongue is as good as gone. "I know I'm pathetic, useless, and criminal scum, but you make me want to change. You make me ashamed of who I am — and thank you for that — because I don't want to live like this forever. I don't enjoy cracking gold teeth out of the mouths of corpses with a pair of pliers or hawking the wedding rings of somebody's dead grandparents just so I can scrape enough cash together to feed my brothers." The pause that ensues after his words are accidental. "My brother, I mean." The Ripley brothers and Penelope and Learna flash through my mind like a thunderstorm, and Nino and I are living, walking proof of the damage it left in its wake. But, right now, I want anything more than I want to remember my family, or my responsibilities, or my regret, or my guilt - not when I'm already not sure if what I really want is standing right before me, bleeding out words as if he couldn't say them fast enough.

He averts the subject in a much safer direction, toward the buried memories of his parents. Apparently, he inherited his grave robbing tendencies from his father, and digging into freshly turned earth reminds him of a time before the Ripley's parents died. It is awful, but at least he has somewhat of a justification behind his cruelty, whereas I have none. Broken pearls don't really amount to much in the end.

I've made more deals than the number of treasures the Ripley brothers stole from the dead, and even Nino knows my pretty face can't hide how rotten I've become. I'm as unfortunate as the souls I seal deals with; I'm a flowerless child with no hope for growing out of this state of constant corruption. Even Nino, no matter how many times he confesses his love for me, can agree I'm not truly worth anything. Everything he loves about me can be fragilely crushed or physically destroyed that I wonder if I was ever worth him loving to begin with.

"It's all I've got left of him," Nino continues. "That and the memories of how much he loved my mother. I think that's why, sometimes when I look at you, I remember him better than I ever had the chance to know him. I look at you and I think I really must be my father's son, I really must have grown up to look just like him."

I shake my head, an immediate dislike for being compared to a sweet motherly figure when I am anything but. I relish in the destruction of others, including my own, and that's probably the reason why I let Nino inch forward, even when I know I shouldn't.

His hands cradle my face, and he leans in so breathlessly close that I can feel his heartbeat against my own, and the pulse drumming against the veins in his wrist tremor against my cheek. "I'm going to shut up and kiss you now, okay?" Our lips are already touching when he murmurs one last, "Okay."

Greed consumes every jumping atom within me as I place one hand on his cheek and hook the other around his neck, bringing him closer to me than he already is. In his arms, convicted of an armistice with our lips pressed against the other's, it's impossible for me to deny any longer that I don't want him, when the wrenching feeling in my gut says otherwise.

The paradox of life is that we are both living and dying at the same time, and, even though we know we'll all end up returning to stardust in the end, we still struggle to grasp moments as fleeting as these in our short lifetimes.

We both almost fall over the ledge of the rooftop, and although Nino reels me back in toward him, I'm sure free falling and kissing him feels no different than the other.

When I open my eyes again, a peaceful quiet settles between us that makes me wish we could've spent the entirety of last year in this kind of silence, instead. Nino smiles, and says, "Someday I'm going to marry you and there won't be anything pretend about it."

If this were still some sort of deal, if we were still playing some sort of game, I'd disentangle my limbs from his with a sly smirk and clever words and walk away. I'm addicted to that sort of pain a girl inflicts upon herself, the same way she runs silver blades over her wrists or how a boy runs purposefully into dark alleyways searching for fights - to remind myself that, no matter how broken I am, I could still be more broken. It's an optimistic way of looking at the darkest things, but the game is over, and there are no winners, and the odds are still not in our favor. His confession begs me to be merciful, to spare him the truth, and I'd like to hope that maybe I'm not that merciless. If anyone deserves the truth, however, it would be Nino.

I don't return a smile, instead, I run my hand over the spot where his heart beats, again. It almost feels whole. "I don't want to break your heart -" what happens if I already have? "- but I've always been pretty selfish, haven't I?" I raise my gaze from my hand resting on his ribcage to his own eyes and resist the temptation to kiss him again.

I don't really love him, not in the way he expects me to, yet, anyhow. But, I want him to know, even if just for tonight, that either way, "I'd rob your grave, even if you had nothing worth robbing."

We're both a pretty ridiculous pair of fools, and I'd be damned if we didn't destroy each other by the time we walk out of this roof. Even while I speak, I'm still listening for a sign that Nino Ripley won't be the end of me.

"I'd still take all of it."