Hot Chocolate Eyes

She stands. A rusty fire escape hanging at her side and her hand gripping it, flaking metal staining her skin. There is the mournful ragged sigh of forgotten papers and crushed cans pushed along by the wind through the alleyway where only she stands. Alone.

The second story window above her is broken, crystalline shards upon the black-splattered gray of the concrete. And she tilts her head, eyes squinted, breath caught in her memory. Her hand taps the window that is no longer there, fingers never leaving the fire escape she clenches white-knuckled.

Dry lips part and a name is whispered, the word mixing with the unconscious pound of her nails against metal. There is no voice to answer, no sound to soothe the occasional moan too quiet to be heard.

The memories are alive in her, lucid and tangible. She wraps herself around them and melts into the sponge of the past…

****

Eyes and lips. They are all that exist in the darkness, all she can see. Eyes and lips. The eyes are brown, tender and deep and strong, a drink of hot chocolate, and the lips are dark and angular.

They sit. A bench in the park. The lips move and she watches them, moonlight reflecting off the glint of their wetness as his tongue carefully smoothes them over. It seems as if they want to speak, but something stops them, trapped in a broken-record tremble until finally:

“Please don’t ever leave.”

A moment of vulnerability held suspended in his everlasting strength, held dangling from those strong arms that hold her and glittering before the sharp lines of a face she can barely see in night’s embrace.

She stares, sipping from those hot chocolate eyes, sugar rush dancing through the tension of her muscles, across the tingle of her skin, thumping loudly in her ears. No words. Only her body erupting into red warmth as he pulls her against him. Head to chest, hand on waist, fingers in hair.

She will never leave.

*****

It has happened again.

They are watching her. Watching her and laughing at her, with their large white teeth and lipsticked lips. Silky hair dances in harsh fluorescent lights with Medusa-like life.

She looks up at those hard eyes, so many hard eyes. Knives, each of them, but not elegant beautiful ones, lacking the fine craftsmanship of a vintage dagger. They are more common, more petty, more quick and easy and routine. Like box cutters.

The tongues speak fire-searing words, red and flailing. They tie themselves in knots inside of her, twisting grotesquely into the organs of her body, drilling through her flesh. More box cutter slashes and she bleeds, dark and thick congealing, streaming down her arms and pooling in her fists so that when she swings out to slam them into those large, white, beacon teeth they are heavy and stiff.

One of the tongues stops flailing. There is a thump as the body falls to the floor.

She runs.

*****

Wetness on her cheeks. She doesn’t know how it got there, and she touches it with a trembling hand, fingers tracing salty river trails. Her lungs hurt, worn and chaffed by the chilled air. She has come from very far, very fast. She can’t remember the rest.

The alleyway is empty. It always is. Her feet find the steps of the fire escape, arms pull languidly upward. The creak of the metal is a deafening roar that echoes between the time-abused faces of the dilapidated buildings. She comes to the second floor window, dark curtains behind dirty glass and harsh metal bars, and her finger taps the pane gently, coming away stone-gray from dirt.

And then the window lifts and there are his hot chocolate eyes and dark, angled lips.

There is more wetness on her cheeks.

*****

The thick plastic of the restaurant booth squeaks gently as she moves against it, placing her hands folded on the table. There is coffee there, the mug still full and steamless. She stairs at the web of her intertwined fingers.

He is sitting across the table, and she can feel him there, the intangible touch of him. It is a precursor to the caress of his hand along the side of her face, sandpaper rough and wonderful, the tip of a finger sliding down the corner of her down-turned lips and tugging it upward.

She smiles. It is weak and almost lost in the frowning crinkle of her chin, fading quickly, a transient vapor across her face. And then he is there beside her, and her hands make balls of fabric out of his shirt as she falls into him. His guardian arms hold her.

Her lips, thick with salty tears fill the air with questions, straining to be heard over the background noise of clinking silverware and empty conversation. His voice is a gentle cuddle. And it no longer matters if they all hate her, because he doesn’t and he is here.

One last request before she falls into silence:

“Don’t ever leave.”

*****

She remembers the day he died. Remembers the doctor, the precision-fire eyes and accurate tone. He had gone into the office with her, holding her hand and assuring her with warm hot chocolate eyes as she entered uncertainly and sat in the large red-cushioned seat.

They’d moved her from room to room, test to test, and despite her refusals and resistance they turned her body and mind inside out. But he was there, and that kept her sane, through all the tearing and shredding she felt as they asked about her childhood, the friends she had never had and the family that had never loved her.

Then the doctor offered her a pill, a white pill held out in a white gloved hand. And when she’d refused they’d given her a shot and a white bed in a white room to sleep on. White everywhere, blinding… a hazy snowstorm as her mind drifted into drug-induced sleep. She sank into the bed, into his arms, the only color in a fading world.

But when she woke up he was gone. And they told her he had died. She was alone.

She stands now. A rusty fire escape hanging at her side and her hand gripping it, flaking metal staining her skin. She is not alone. She can feel it. And as she turns to look down the alleyway to see him standing there, angled lips, hot-chocolate eyes, she wants only to feel those arms around her.

Running, heart pounding steps upon broken glass and obsolete newspapers, she falls again into him, he swinging her around and landing her gently on the ground again. His nose parts her hair as lips find her ear and whisper:

“I missed you.”

She cannot speak, and she knows there is no need to. He is here.

And she stands there, entangled in him, through him, and she is him and he is her. She chokes out his name and tells him never to leave again.

A voice at her ear that is not his, a hand on her shoulder without his touch, and someone else is there. “He’s not real.” She turns in his arms, sees the woman in the uniform she chooses not to recognize. There is a pill in the woman’s hand, a white pill that has been her daily companion for too many years. And she shakes her head vigorously, wrapping her arms tightly around the ones that hold her.

“He’s not real.” The woman repeats. “Take this and it will all be better.” Motherly countenance and raised brow implore her.

She shakes her head again, so violently that it hurts, turning back into his arms and pressing her hands into the muscles of his back. She will never let go.

And then there is the familiar pin-prick of the death bite in her shoulder and she cries the scream of the dying as she slips to her knees, hands sliding down the familiar form of his body even as it dissolves and she is left to be dragged off to oblivion as she sees the woman standing over her holding a shot in her hand.

Her eyes close over wet floods. She knows that he is gone again.

*****

She is lying in a bed. It is a white bed in a white room and she is cold. She feels she is missing something, unsure of what but knowing distinctly that she is alone. It is a sharp sense of truth in the reflective haze of the white.

It does not change when the woman enters the room and ask if there is anything she needs.

She feels there is something very important but can’t quite remember what. But she is cold and shivering and there is only one thing she can think of:

“A cup of hot chocolate please.”