Writing Check-In (sort of): When the Moon, Ch 14
This isn’t really new stuff, but I’m exhausted and sad and need WtM!Peeta so badly. So, here he is.
This time it’s Peeta who’s confused, tilting his head in puzzlement at my words, and I want so badly to kiss him that I just do it, leaning forward to take his curly head in both hands and planting my lips squarely against the crown. “Touching you – and being touched by you in turn – feels like home,” I murmur against his scalp. “I could never hope to earn such a comfort, let alone dream of paying it back.”
He leans back just enough to meet my eyes, so slight a movement that it doesn’t even shift my hands from their gentle anchors on the sides of his head. “I thought we were past earning and paying back,” he says softly, but he doesn’t sound upset or troubled in the least. He sounds curious, tender…hopeful, even, but in a deep, almost hungry sort of way.
“I sincerely hope we are,” I whisper, because there’s no way I could ever even begin to rectify the debt between us.
“Then could you please hold me a little longer?” he whispers back. “Because it feels so good to be in your arms that it hurts to be like this, so close and so far apart all at once.”
“Does it?” I rasp, because it’s excruciating on my end. It hurts more than I would ever have dreamt the absence of something could. My body aches everywhere, as though I’m being pulled constantly and inexorably by a strange sort of gravity, only that force is pulling me toward Peeta, not the earth, and every moment that I hold myself back from him is like trying to stop yourself from crashing into the earth in a freefall from a tall tree. I feel empty and cold and almost incomplete, as if anytime I’m not physically in contact with him, I’m missing pieces; crucial pieces of my heart and lungs and even that profound, elusive thing my father called a soul, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be whole again. Touch, however tender and affectionate, is fleeting, even shallow in its comfort. I feel like I need Peeta inside me – his warmth and musk and gold flooding that heavy, pulsing hollow at the root of my belly that aches worst of all – to ever truly quench that hunger; that desperation for wholeness, and the impossibility of that is heartbreaking, even terrifying.
“If-If you don’t want to –” he wavers, but there was never any shadow of hesitation in my body or my mind. I kick back the furs and tug him up beside me, immediately climbing into his lap and winding myself around him like a particularly affectionate snake; arms snug around his neck and legs knotted about his waist, and squeeze him so hard that he whimpers.
