you're too young & eager to love

“Mein Kommandant,” she murmurs, her mouth like blood, rich in crimson, pressed to his cold ear. “Aufwachen.”

He reaches, his hand settling against the side of her face. He smears his thumb, hard, across her lips.



She had a smallness about her that belied her true strength. Adira had large hands with dull nails, but she was delicate everywhere else. Her weak chin, her thin lips, her half-sunken eyes and the sharpness of her bones. He could count her ribs when she stretched her arms above her head.

He liked to drag his teeth over the ridges and dips of skeleton beneath her skin. Her sliver of hip. The round rock of bone where her hand met her wrist. The threat of her severe elbow. The protruding twin icicles that were her collarbones.

He is a statue in comparison, a solid, perfect specimen of the male form, all his bones and muscles carved into an ideal shape. She could straddle his prone body and feel weightless above him or hide beneath, sheltered by his formidable width, a brittle carcass tucked close to his heart. She would place her palm against his side and stomach and follow the cut of his body with her long fingers. There is a deep line on either side of his abdomen, charting his hips, that she liked to trace.



Roman remembers her in snow. The crunch of her heavy boots on ice, how pale she was, in a world blanketed in white. The black of her leather riding crop in her hand. The collar of her uniform turned up against her neck and cheeks.

He remembers her in cut-off dresses, thin fabric slashed off at the thigh, the brightness from a pearl dangling from her left ear. He remembers when she used to speak French, her most fluent language, and the syrupy quality of her voice. She used to smell first of man’s cologne and then of cigarette ash; there was no bottom note, no lasting scent (he knows it is the same with him). This was an era of decadence, before the wars, with jarring, feverish music and never ending liquor.

The blood boiled then.



She sinks her teeth into his wrist and feels the groan leave his mouth.

The blood is thick, primordial, sticky with strength. It splashes hot against her tongue. Roman takes her own arm to his mouth and completes the circle.