Page 107 of Ghost Ribbon

More permanent.

Was it care?

The word felt clumsy in my mouth. Care implied softness I didn’t trust myself to perform.

Was it love?

I barely knew what the word meant outside of clinical definitions and cynical deconstructions.

And yet.

When I looked at Marco, I wanted impossible things.

I wanted to preserve him. I wanted to cage every cruel thing the universe had ever fashioned before it could learn the shape of his name. I wanted to unmake every wound carved into him and bury the hands that had held the knife.

His smile felt like an endangered species, something too fragile to survive in a world that devoured beautiful things. Every time it appeared, I found myself wanting to lock it away.

I wanted to kill anyone who hurt him.

Slowly and quickly. Both. Simultaneously.

I wanted to put myself between him and harm the way the earth puts itself between the core and the cold of space.

This wasn’t romantic.

Not in any way poets would recognize.

It was visceral. I wanted to carve his name into my bones so that if anyone ever found my corpse, they would know who had owned me completely.

That was what frightened me.

I had been raised to consume. To control. To bend the world into shapes that served my family’s interests and my own satisfaction. And now I found myself wanting to be consumed.

I didn’t know what that made me.

I didn’t know what that made us.

All I knew was that I could no longer go a day without seeing him. Without hearing his voice. Without confirming that he still existed in the world, still breathed, still carried that impossible brightness that had cracked open the void in me with no regard for whether I wanted to be cracked.

I looked at him now.

We were near his house, on a small hill I had discovered during one of my nocturnal observations. The city was distant enough that the light pollution softened, and the stars above us burned with a clarity I rarely found in places I usually inhabited.

Marco was looking at the stars.

He sat with his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. The moonlight turned his olive skin silver at the edges, made his lashes cast shadows against his cheeks, pulled soft highlights from the wild disorder of his hair.

He looked so beautiful I could barely breathe.

I had seen him frightened and shattered and naked and undone. I had seen him furious, shy, laughing, crying, asleep, awake, wanting, pulling away. Every version of him was burned into me now with the permanence of scar tissue. And still, still, every time I looked at him, I found something new. Some angle of light I hadn’t noticed. Some expression that rearranged the architecture of my chest.

God.

I would never get over how pretty he was.

He was looking at the stars, pointing out something low on the horizon, saying something about his hope star that I barely heard because I was too busy memorizing the shape of his profile against the dark.

I didn’t look at the stars.