Every Day is Silent and Gray - Complete

Chapter 2

You allowed Dimitri to guide you back to his room, the taste of his lips still on yours, your hand dwarfed within his. You walked in silence, nervous about this new and nebulous accord between the two of you. As beautiful as it was fragile, you were hesitant to say anything lest the tenuous truce between you fracture. Because while you'd offered Dimitri your devotion, a willing supplicant at love's altar, your trust was a more expensive boon. Dimitri revoking his heart had wounded yours in ways even you found hard to fathom; it would take time to come back from that.

"It's not much," he said, opening the door and showing you into a dorm room almost as dismal and dreary as your own. Along with the usual double bed, desk, and chair, a small bookshelf and a poster were the only concessions to his hard-earned humanity.

"You still read Westerns?" you asked, walking into his room, your eyes raking across the neatly ordered titles.

"Always," he'd replied, his lip curling a little while his eyes regarded you tenderly. He seemed relieved you'd found something to talk about. A proverbial way to break the ice.

"Always," you repeated softly, the word bringing to mind a different conversation from a different time. Then the word had been given as assurance. A promise fate had proven perversely preposterous given the cataclysmic events that followed.

Sensing your disquiet, Dimitri led you to the side of his bed, motioning for you to sit before he did likewise, taking your hands within his. Apprehensively perched on the edge of the mattress, your eyes locked onto where he laced his fingers through yours, you listened as Dimitri confessed.

He started out seated beside you, observing you as he commenced his descant. A soliloquy of self-loathing, solecism, and shame, you'd been incapable of raising your eyes to meet his. His voice sounded so tortured, you weren't sure you could bear to witness his dolor—to corroborate it as proportionate and parallel to your own.

Yet somehow, more distressing than his words of repentance was the lack of confidence with which he voiced them. Used, as you were, to believing Dimitri a gift from the Gods, his hesitant assertions made him sound more like a fallen angel, 'committed to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment.' The judgment he'd been convinced you'd deliver, you then appreciated.

It was a revelation. In your mind, Dimitri was a strong, stalwart man who during his resurrection had realized you weren't enough for him. It had never occurred to you that the corollary of his time in the darkness might be that he imagined he was no longer meritorious or worthy of you; that he'd regarded it an act of benevolence to release you from your mutual admiration and obligation.

He slipped from the side of the bed, kneeling in front of you and peering up at you tenderly as he avowed his unaltered regard. And then, acknowledging the devastation he'd inflicted upon you, Dimitri begged you for the opportunity to expiate the fissures he'd bestowed on your heart and soul.

Unable to answer beyond a teary sob and a nod, you allowed yourself to be swept into his arms; the two of you embracing on his bed as together you quietly savored the experience of simply being together once again.

"I'm going to woo you," he crooned. "We'll take things slow. I've hurt you, and I need to show you I'm genuine."

And rather than argue, you smiled; privately relieved he hadn't pushed you any further. While you loved Dimitri, and you now knew you'd always love Dimitri, you were looking forward to enjoying his pertinacity. First, he needed to convince you he was in for the long haul – then he needed to finally step forward and publicly declare his love for you. The time for furtive, recondite affection had passed. You wanted, no you deserved for Dimitri to promulgate his feelings – at least amongst those closest to you.