Lionheart.
You have spent one summer contemplating the intricacies of a boy with white knuckles and seaside-blue eyes. Watching. Waiting. Wondering if the gods might have written it wrong and he is not the good to your evil, the strength to your weakness, the empire to your ruins.
Star-gazing eyes have left you breathless—shell-shocked by the idea that his bones are built from the molten lava stirring beneath his soon-to-be kingdom and that he bleeds Pompeii from the wounds he asks you to stitch back together. His skin does not blister beneath the sun the way yours does; his shoulder blades never crack or diminish beneath the heavy weight of his armour; he harbours the power of lightning in each and every one of his blows and you wonder if one day you might be his thunder.
You learn to read the coding of his spine better than any spell or poem you have ever tried to memorize, and you find yourself hoping that one day he will press you into his vertebrae and curl around your shape the way you have his. He presses his thumb into the centre of your palm and you think maybe he already has. Maybe he sees what you see and has decided that he wants your thunder after all.
But you are eighteen and too young to decide that you will never belong anywhere else. He reminds you of this on the nights you get a little too comfortable—nights you aren’t trembling every time his fingertips brush yours.
But he is all you ever dreamed he would be.
