Secret Service

by Tal Bauer

There are people who should not come together in this world. Reality quakes too strongly beneath the force of their love. I am no one. I am no titan, no giant walking this planet, but if my love for this man was ever tested—if ever the world tried to take him from me—I would rip the sky from the edges of this earth. This love I feel terrifies me, and it’s terrified me from the moment our gazes first locked, when the distance between our souls seemed like an impossible, unknowable divide. Human beings are not meant to carry nuclear reactors within their hearts.

Powerful

We should never have met, because there’s nothing I won’t do for Brennan, and that kind of love—burn the world down, fly the black flag, you are my forever for always—is too dangerous.

This

It smears away the edges of the world, narrowing my focus, drawing me into Walker’s gaze. I’m about to fall, tip over into those bleu clair eyes, slide into the center of this man—

Such beautiful phrasing

His fingers tremble, ever so faintly, in my hold. When he drops my hand, he makes a fist, his knuckles clenched so tight they’re white as moondust.

Wonderful descriptors

Why did time seem to stop and start in freeze-frames, moments like photographs thrown into the air?

Wow

I’m juggling lit matches that he’s passing to me over a tank of rocket fuel. My brain is screaming to disengage, to walk away before it’s too late. Nothing irrevocable has been done yet. Dreams can be forgotten.

🔥

“You’re under my skin. You’re inside my mind. You’re down deep in my bones. You’re everywhere, and you’re everything. I can’t escape, but I also don’t want to escape. From you, or from this.” His eyes are huge, tumbled sapphires lit on fire. “You feel inevitable. Like I’ve been waiting for you.”

The words...the feelings

He kisses me like the sun kisses the earth when it rises. Slow, an unfolding of warmth, of playful light and hints of heat. And then, all at once, bright and hot and burning away all doubt. We come together like this is fate, like I was always meant to kiss him and he was always meant to kiss me.

Beautiful

Brennan is black lightning and blues, neon-soaked rain squalls, bayou midnights and creeping Spanish moss. He’s unknowable depths, flame-hot touches and bleu clair eyes. He’s the mystery, the moon rising in the west, the secrets written on bones and cast under dark stars. Some part of me may need Sheridan, like the earth needs the rays of the sun. But I was made to love Brennan Walker. And then I was set down in this life, where that love is an impossibility.

Sob

How I will saw the sky from the earth, drain the oceans, haul down the stars. How I will melt my soul to molten steel and form bullets out of my broken heart.

Perfect