[ He makes promise after promise (and she doesn't doubt a single one) but never do the words I love you pass his lips. (She, by contrast, still tells him day by day, though the task only grows more difficult — not because it becomes any less true but because she gets the feeling that each time the words go unreturned there is less for her to give. (She figures she can't ask him if it's true. Again, unquantifiable.)
Soon, too, is an unquantifiable term, one that means different amounts of time to different people, but she doesn't much have the heart to ask him to specify. Where he sees the beginnings of tears in her eyes, she sees panic in his, and (and she wonders if love really is as terrible as all that) she bites back the sentiment that threatens to bubble over, walking a tightrope for a series of instants before the line of her lips straightens out again and the flush to her cheeks begins to die back down.
Soon, he says, and she's reaching for the sun again despite knowing it'll burn. ]
I love you.
[ At this point — worn out and worn down — she doesn't particularly care what he has to say in return. It's an affirmation, more than not (cross my heart and hope to die, there isn't anyone else for me, either, not in a million years; a stupid sentiment, in a way — nobody lives that long — but the chiding voice that says so dies away in a matter of instants). ]
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Soon, too, is an unquantifiable term, one that means different amounts of time to different people, but she doesn't much have the heart to ask him to specify. Where he sees the beginnings of tears in her eyes, she sees panic in his, and (and she wonders if love really is as terrible as all that) she bites back the sentiment that threatens to bubble over, walking a tightrope for a series of instants before the line of her lips straightens out again and the flush to her cheeks begins to die back down.
Soon, he says, and she's reaching for the sun again despite knowing it'll burn. ]
I love you.
[ At this point — worn out and worn down — she doesn't particularly care what he has to say in return. It's an affirmation, more than not (cross my heart and hope to die, there isn't anyone else for me, either, not in a million years; a stupid sentiment, in a way — nobody lives that long — but the chiding voice that says so dies away in a matter of instants). ]