He brushed a wandering strand of hair out of her face.
“I love you, Rhye.”
“I know,” she said, smiling, “I really do know.”
He bent down and kissed that smile as if it was the
last thing he would ever do. As if her kiss was necessary to sustain him, and his life depended upon it. As if the second
he stopped, he would never breathe again. He kissed that beautiful smile with everything he had.
She smelt of flowers. It was a fresh scent, crisp and clean, like the
smell of the world after the rain. And her skin, the touch of it unfamiliar to his indelicate hands, was remarkably soft. In
war, nothing was soft. There were no tender caresses, no subtle breezes, no halcyon moments when the paracosmic fantasies of youth decorated the mind. Each touch was a raw grasp for reality, each breeze a violent windstorm, and each moment plagued with languid thoughts of the next.
He buried his head into her shoulder. In battle, men buried
themselves into the earth. The earth was soft to them. It was their comfort. They clung to it as their comrades died--even as they themselves died--and
they breathed it in as if it would give them life.
She gave him life, filled him with it, and he
embraced it.
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