Heloise Holds the Sun ✓

8. adam and eve

━━━━━━━┛ ✠ ┗━━━━━━━━

The first time he pressed his lips to mine, we had been sitting side by side at the desk, combing over charts of irregular Latin verbs. We had been rhyming them off together in unison, until he suddenly fell silent. I looked to him and his eyes were intent - they were hungry.

My skin prickled for how close he sat to me. If I moved even an inch, I would be pressed against him.

"Dear God, Heloise. How you tempt me," his voice was coarser than usual, and heat wrapped around my face to hear it.

"Do you mind that I tempt you?"

"I do not." There was resolve in his voice. Knowing him, he had stayed up nights pondering the merits and dangers of acting on this passion. And he had now decided; it was clear across all of his features.

My chest heaved in anticipation, for nearer and nearer he was coming toward me. A thought flashed through my mind that I might be able to stop it: now or now or now. I knew it would be to jump off a cliff - I knew it would be to change everything. This man whose life had been dedicated to God. The great theologian. My teacher.

But beneath the titles, my Abelard.

His mouth was rough against mine, and I returned his desire with just as much force. It swelled in us, this wanting; and my hands reached hungrily up his back, then up his neck, then gathering his hair in fists... on his lips were soft groans; of release - of the fruition of so many days and nights of anticipation... all of this had been resting, from the beginning, in our eyes. Dancing there. Teasing there.

After that, it was all I thought of. We would be trying to make our way through some lesson plan or other and I wouldn't be able to focus - the heat of him so close to me; the sound of his words as they read literature into the air, when I would have much rather they were spoken against my ear. I wanted him. I had never wanted something with all of my blood like this.

Eventually, we relinquished all restraints of this wanting.

And I wanted him inside of me - all around me. To consume me entirely. It might sound crass but I assure you it wasn't. It was spiritual. It was poetry. We were one... the weight of his body against mine - flesh on flesh - felt like it was always meant to be there.

We were Adam and Eve, standing at the beginning of the world. We were primordial Man and Woman; it seemed we invented all of it, every movement.

I knew how Eve must have felt, declaring with certainty that there was no one else. There was no one else.

I could not believe, if you had told me, that any woman had ever loved another man as much.

It felt we ruled the world from this one bed in my one chamber, bathed again and again in the afternoon light drifting through my window. Limbs moving against limbs; fingertips clawing at flesh. Mouths hot and raw, exploring... lips and necks and leaving trails on chests down to stomachs. Through each other, we tried to quench a thirst we never could.

In his eyes, there was the entirety of my sun.

No longer did it rise above me. It was here. This was the centre of my world. The source of all its light. Breathing sweet words against my ear. "Heloise." My name sounded like music.

Shivers through my bones. Fires all along my skin where he touched it.

My body was cold everywhere he wasn't touching.

All day, I wanted him. When he opened my door, we would right away delve into the satin caress of bedsheets, flesh bared raw and hungry. His hands rough against the soft of my cheek. Crushing our lips together; gasping for air...

We no longer opened a single book.

We would lie there for hours. The rest of the world was a horrible distraction drawing us away from this nest we'd made.

You could not have told me, lying there afterwards, with my cheeks red and my hands clutched around the sweaty embrace of my lover, that two people were not meant to find the deepest contentment in each other. You could not have told me that love - this love as I knew it - was a sin. It was anything but lowly - anything but dirty and earthly and debasing.

It seemed we alone shared a secret, that you could fight against with all logic but you would never truly know was unless you stood where we stood. Logic did not reach here. Our hearts were magnets.

This love... it did not weaken me. It did not crush my soul as sin might. It seemed, instead, to glow in me, from my bones outward. And never before had I looked towards the future of my life with such zeal.

I saw the same zeal in his eyes. The same strengthening. We had become one: all we knew was each other; and in knowing each other, we had become bigger than we had been alone.

"In another world, you would have been my wife," he whispered lovingly against my temple one afternoon. "There would be no one else."

"I would never have been your wife, mon amour," I swept the sweat-streaked locks of hair from his face.

"Tell me why not," we bathed each other, in between syllables, in the most savouring of kisses.

"Because I would have wanted to love you always."

━━━━━━━┓ ✠ ┏━━━━━━━━