Leather and Lace

A request for medameuvinho

Is love so fragile
And the heart so hollow
Shatter with words
Impossible to follow
You're saying I'm fragile I try not to be
I search only for something I can't see

It would take just one, small push, she knew. Just the tiniest of nudges to send them hurling to the ground and shattering in millions of unrepairable pieces. This, she felt in her very marrow. Over the past six months, arguments with ugly words had become a more frequent occurrence. There were be periods of time when she hardly saw him and longer stretches of time where he'd be around, physically, but emotionally, he was an island.

"Your words mean shit if your actions don't mirror them, Taylor," she blurted angrily during one of their more bitter arguments. "You can tell me you love me until you're fucking blue in the face and it doesn't matter. You're not acting like you love me."

"Hey, don't talk to me about actions speaking louder than words, okay?" Taylor's face contorted with rage, though his voice wasn't raised a single decibel. "I told you when you got offered the film, it was going to ruin us. We never see each other as it is and you want to take a lead role in a movie and finish up the tour and write an album and where the fuck does that leave me, Stef?"

In the end, it mattered not how much they loved one another; it wasn't enough to sustain them.

In her romantic heart, through all of the tears and heartache, she still chose to believe that love existed, that somewhere out there, her soulmate was waiting.

I have my own life and I am stronger
Than you know
But I carry this feeling
When you walked into my house
That you won't be walking out the door
Still I carry this feeling
When you walked into my house
That you won't be walking out the door

"Did you have ever have that feeling like you've known someone, always? I don't know how much belief you have in past lives or any of that but I dunno," she shrugged, taking off her sunglasses to regard him, taking her chances to squint in the bright sunshine. "It's just this overwhelming certainty that we've met before. And I don't mean SNL, where we were literally standing right next to each other," smiling teasingly, she was pleased to see he was smiling as well. "Like really and truly knew one another. And I don't have that feeling about just anyone."

Bradley twirled the lone piece of spaghetti left on his plate onto the fork, chewing before answering. "I know exactly what you mean."

His eyes glistened, the blue of the water from the summers she'd spent in Sicily as a child and she was grateful he didn't find her bold statement trite or cloying.

"I'm glad." She inched her hand across the table to lay it atop his, pressing her thumb almost unconsciously into the subtle bend of his wrist.

Touch was something that came as naturally as the ebb and flow of breath; a hug, a palm on a forearm, her head resting on a shoulder, a casual kiss hello and goodbye. It was how she was raised but she was immediately attuned if someone was uncomfortable with her gestures of attention and she tapered them to suit the person.

Bradley made no move to pull away or shrink back and for a good minute, in the quiet of the patio, they remained like that; her hand on his much larger one, feeling the heat of his skin and a kind of relief settled into her chest, landing and sticking between the spaces of her ribs.

This, something cried out from someplace deep, this is what you've been waiting for.

The notion never dissipated on a wisp of smoke as she thought it maybe would when they sang. Connection was a tricky animal; chemistry didn't always translate musically and the rare instances that it did, it was unforced, unplanned. She could only hope that the magic juxtaposition carried over as their voices joined and if that worked, on film.