Only You

storm

We've been flying down this highway on a carriage of silver for hours now, neither of us quite knowing where we'll end up and only vaguely aware of the world around us. The highway signs flash and bend like lights seen dancing through drunken eyes. The sky is a rippling pool of ink and we are a knife cutting soundlessly through it. 

Cate hums absent-mindedly, turning the little angel I'd given her over and over in her hand, so that its small ceramic face is already worn smooth from her touch. 

And as the highway stretches on endlessly, with no beginning or end, and growing blurry from sudden unexplainable tears, I have a vision of this car spinning out of control and going up in beautiful flames. And Cate and I would spiral into the cold stars together, a lovely hologram in the blaze. Oh, the sight in the morning would be stark and gray, the broken glass no longer sparkling, the light having flown from our eyes, and the two of us stripped bare by the empty words the people throw at us. But tonight, I think, we might have our own two seconds of burning euphoria. 

Cate glances at me, a rose next to a ghost orchid. I look at her. My hands stay steady, though their knuckles become pale with the effort of resisting the urge to compulsively jerk to the side. 

It would be an exquisite thing to die with Cate, I think, almost as heavenly as living with her. But does she feel the same? What if--maybe one day we might--

Cate sees the sudden tear that falls down my face, and places a cool hand against my cheek. 

"I think I'm going insane," I say, my voice like gravel. "Cate, do you think we'll be in love forever?"

Her fingers slide down my face, tracing the path of my tear; I feel them go down my neck, my shoulder, my arm. She clasps my hand in hers. 

The fear is like a shaft of thin steel that falls between us, slicing off what we were too slow to get out of the way, so that each of us found ourselves on either side of the shaft with a lock of the other's hair in our hands. 

"I'll cling to you," she says, her honey voice smoothing down my rough one. "Until you are bored of me."

Cate, clinging to anyone? The thought makes me smile incredulously. And imagine being bored of her.

She leans over and I feel a feathery touch of her breath on my ear as she kisses my neck. 

"I love you," Cate says. "And we will tear down walls with our love. We will rip out floors and leave a town in ruins. Jude...."

And her voice becomes a sigh of the wind, a swoop of a paintbrush, as she whispers some lines of a poem I'd written for her back to me. 

"I was your crashing thunder, you were my pouring rain; and no one needs to know about the storm we made."