you're too young & eager to love

Classic Shaine and Emere. Post-Mia breakup, I imagine.

One-pager.

Suggestion of incest? You can never trust Emere's drunk implications.





“You’re too thin again.” He says it softly as though the voice could magnify the unwillingness of the man.

“Because I cannot survive without you.” Emere sounds serious, somber, and only a fool would believe her effortless lies. She arches an eyebrow, amused by her ability to speak anything other than truths.

Shaine drinks his wine.

Emere stands in front of his knees. Her wrists are breakable. He fingers the bottom of her slip, black silk and delicate, barely concealing the knives of her bones. If a bruise could be personified, he thinks, it would be her. When he stands, Emere wraps her arms around his neck, leaning into the coldness of his chest. There are no lovers here and neither of them cares for the dance. “You miss me.” She traces the syllables with her fingertips against the back of his neck. Shaine can smell the lemon of her last martini on her breath – sour and sweet and distinctly Emere.

“You are exhausting.”

“Which is why you miss me.” To his chagrin, he laughs. Punctuates the aftermath by holding her arms too tightly.

“I cannot miss what I never had.”

She slaps him across the jaw. Because she can. Because it is something to do. When he grabs her by the waist, she thinks of Brando. Equally tall and with callouses on his hands. Except Shaine does not smell like the grease of cars. In fact, he has no real smell at all, just the cotton and denim of his clothes. Her laugh, however, is the same with both men – low and anguished and lovely.



She makes him think of holy water and blasphemies, of deep lush gardens, and the way a kiss can betray. So he cannot kiss her but bites at her mouth, succumbing to weaker urges and the easy shame of familiarity. She laughs around the space of his lips and it is the same noise as before, tinged with the need to conquer. “Coward.” Emere whispers, although she could be talking about either of them. He is too frightened to forget how to fall, and she is too calloused to care. This, though, is appropriate. It is necessary for their navigation of each other. There is no space for etiquette, for the quiet comfort of a bed or the intimacy of gentleness. The urgency is what Emere craves, as sacred to her character as Shaine’s crosses are to him.

In his haste, he tears the fabric of her slip. In his haste, he rips and bruises.

If she were more of a woman, this would be about sacrifice.

But it isn’t.



Theirs is a rhythm and a madness.

“This is all I know of you.” Shaine groans into her ear, and Emere thinks that this is an admission meant to blister. But he does not know how to strike. Their separation has made him fragile, forgetful.

“You fuck like my brother.”

Emere, the beauty, the liar.