Forget Me Not

by Karissa Kinword

“Yesterday was my favorite day, Eliza,” he mutters, leaning back down to press his forehead to mine. “I am yours in all the same ways—so

Another one, little bird, how many is that?

I can’t...I don’t know. I panted in return. Sy⁠— Just one more.

“What was it you called me the other day?” I doubled over laughing before he even finished the sentence. “A fucking magician.”

This is something Silas has never had. A person to take care of. The delicate soul of another at his fingertips that he has to water, and sun, and tell stories to so that it thrives.

“So what are you waiting for?” I ask as I notch the thick tip of him between the wet, wanting lips of my cunt, sliding it over my clit. “Devour me.”

Oh, those sounds I make. Whining for him. Pleading for him.

I realize in this moment that the steady thump of his heart is my favorite sound, my favorite feeling against my skin. It reminds me he’s real, he’s here—and it reminds me that I am too. A beacon, illuminating from within his body that shows me that no matter the circumstance, I’m where I’m supposed to be. As long as I’m with Silas, I’m home.

He and I, a lock and key together that opens a new door previously sealed to everything worthwhile in life.

Still, I look at him and think: what a vivid dream.

“They must not know that soulmates exist then,”

“Or neither were lucky enough to find theirs.”

“These feelings are not futile, Eliza, they’re rooted and watered. We were always meant to grow this way, it’s divine nature.”

Before I even knew Silas existed, he was my everything.

This isn’t something my body knows how to reject even if it wanted to, and if anything, this trip has shown me that ou...

The more vivid the drea...

Silas reaches out to hold my cheek in his palm, pressing his forehead to mine. “I don’t believe our meeting on this transport was coincidental.” I nod against him. “I’m sure now that nothing is.”

“Make those pretty little noises for me, Eliza—fuck.”

How could something as sweet and beautiful as our relationship go so intensely wrong like this? He’s calculated it over and over in his head. When my mood started to change, what cues he might have missed. He fucked up that day that he didn’t take me to the Continental, this he knows is a fact. There’s been something off about me since I came back from that moon. It changed things.

“I couldn’t wait to be inside you again.”

“That’s a pretty sound, Birdie,” he rasps. “You make the—fuck, the prettiest sounds.”

He always wants to fuck me more. Pour all his love into me in every way he knows how—through his words, through his actions, through poetry, through his body. It never had anywhere to go before, and now it does.

“Take it,” he whispers. “Take it all.” And then, broken: “Please.”

Silas knows we can’t stay here forever, but Maker, he will fucking push it.

But if only for a minute, he wants it all to freeze. He wants nothing to exist but him and I, so that he can give and give and give me all this love he has inside of him in the most devout way he knows how.

If I recite the scripture, he’ll write it on my body with his tongue, burning trails of his faithfulness into me.

Fuck, I just want him to take what’s his.

“Flawless,” he murmurs, sliding his hand from my chest to my collarbone, settling it at the base of my neck. “Fucking celestial being, I can’t...I can’t stop myself with you.”

The deep hum of his chuckle on my skin makes me bite my lip. “Querulous woman,” he nips. “I own you right now.”

“Fucking always,” I sigh. It breaks into a high pitched whimper when he breaches me again, spearing my wet seam open over his tip. “You own me always.”

The uncanny circumstances of our meeting, the undeniable attraction, the resemblance to the person we’ve loved and nurtured with our entire souls since adolescence. There is more to this than even books know to be written about.

Soulmates.

“The word soulmate signifies a unique affinity with deep love toward one specific person. It also refers to the mating of two souls, or the mystical notion of one soul shared in two physical bodies.”

Silas grins as he scans the subject of the open page, charmed by the seemingly never ending ways I find purchase and tug at his heart. The woman he loves is sitting cross-legged in a library, reading of soulmates, recounting it to him. It’s incomparable to any dream he could have conjured himself.

We all have an ingrained necessity to seek out the other half of our souls.”

“Twin souls, predestined by a higher power for one another before birth. Sometimes one soul arrives galaxy-side before the other, which is conceivable in an age difference.”

“There are an imperceivable number of stars in this universe, each made up of two core elements. When one inevitably burns out, the other stagnates to survive—searching for its missing half until it too, perishes. And then the star itself becomes invisible, it just—disappears.” “Stardust,” I interject. “It becomes something else.” “Or someone else.” Silas shrugs. “Two dependent elements separated after millions of years, their dust will always pull in the same direction.”

“This is my church, Birdie,” he whispers to me, dropping his lips into the crook of my neck and lathing an open mouthed kiss to my pulse. “I think I’d like to see you on your knees.”

“Dirty girl.” He grunted before his lips curled into a smug smile. “How unfortunate, that picture that was never painted.”

“You’re a vision, little bird,”

Silas sighs through gritted teeth and lifts the camera again. “You look so pretty with my dick in your mouth, Eliza.”

The Otera, like any other place, has its beauty and richness, its pristine contemporary foregrounds and city-like brick and mortars. Busy sidewalks and busy people—but not all is glazed in gold.

I know the man that is my lover viscerally. How he thinks, feels, the deep hungered way he loves. The thick, threaded connection rooted in both of our bodies that makes him desperate to provide, to protect, to make proud. Silas cares only for me in the purest, most passionate ways.

“You know that’s not true.” I reach up and pull his chin to me. “Hey—look at me. You belong right here. I belong right here.”

He can imagine I’m laying next to him, treat this as the dream he knows he won’t have. The stories I left him with being the only tangible token that I was ever really there.

If I’m a book, then he is all the lines between every sentence. He’s the curve of each letter reaching out to kiss the next, the swooping song of every italic, the pausing breath of well placed punctuation. I am the words, but he is the way in which you read them.

“I know you, Silas. I know you—and I love you.”

“You are a divine piece of this universe, and I will not pluck you from your constellation, little bird. Maker will come looking for the missing star.”

I’m afraid that the distance will blur those crisp and detailed lines though. I’ll start to forget the way his cheeks dimple when he laughs, or the way his voice sounds when he wakes up in the morning. I might forget the placement of the marks on his skin, or how his eyes drown me in the deepest ocean I’ve ever seen.

“Without you I would know nothing of love, Eliza. You are the definition of it,” he says, holding my wrists where they rest underneath his chin. “I am content to be in love with you until the last star falls from the sky.”