this familiar place.

[smithereens]

If Sihai is late to rise, then she is also late to bed, finding comfort in the steady peace of late night, for all the wild animals are a little more restless in their noise-making and the heat a little more unbearable here than it ever was in Wuxia. Night was the only time she was ever really left to her own devices, her mother and the attendants long since answering the call of bed.

There is nothing more important for the preservation of beauty than a good night’s sleep, her mother would say, before pressing an efficient kiss to Sihai’s forehead and sweeping out of the room.

Tonight, their third in this little oasis out in the desert, this secret, sacred place of their own, Sihai finds herself lying awake long after Shakir has fallen asleep, his breath caressing her hair and arms wound so tightly around her she wonders if she can breathe.

She feels as restless as the wild animals, and she takes great pains to extract herself from the cage of Shakir’s body without disturbing him, relieved when all he does is sigh and clutch empty fingers at the space she had been. Something about the sight pulls unfamiliarly at her heart, and she retreats outside of their small tent, plucking his worn cloak off of the floor and wrapping it around her body to ward off the chill. The ends drag in the sand and smooth over her footsteps behind her, as if she had never walked there at all.

Outside, the night is clear and the stars are overbright and foreign, and Sihai feels the vast emptiness of the desert more than she ever has before. In the Saarinen capital, much like her own, she had been constantly surrounded by people, both within the castle walls and without, a swarm of fellow humanity that made her feel both suffocated and very, very alone.

Here, there is no humanity for miles, she knows. It’s terrifying and strangely liberating, then all the more terrifying for how liberating it is; if she were to scream, no one would come but Shakir. If she were to make love to the Saarinen prince, the one she isn’t meant to marry, then no one would ever discover it.

This is the height of stupidity. She also knows this. Involving herself with the second son and not the first is liable to bring the entire proposal, the entire treaty, crashing down around her and her country, a failure they might never recover from. It would be a slap in the face to the Saarinen king and crown prince, and one that they had the luxury of never forgiving. Her father would discard her more thoroughly than all his cool disregard had before, and she knew with absolute certainty that she would know a fury from her mother that she had never seen.

And yet, she wonders what it is about this harsh desert that makes Shakir come alive inside it. The breeze would be claustrophobic if it wasn’t so lifeless, barely tugging at the ends of her loose hair; the sand is cold and coarse against the bottoms of her feet, and pricks her toes when she curls them.

She doesn’t know if she could ever love this place as deeply he does, if she could look upon it with the same tremendous thirst for freedom and joy of life as he does. But she doesn’t know if she ever truly loved Wuxia either, or if her wistfulness for the only home she had ever known was simply because she was accustomed to it.

With a shiver, she pulls the cloak more tightly around her body, tucking the front under her chin and inhaling the familiar spicy, half-wild scent that always seemed to cling to Shakir; it smelled very similar to the desert itself, and she smiles without really knowing why.

She lost track of the time she spent outside, absorbing the spirit of the desert and tracing new patterns in the stars, but when she finally comes back to the tent her eyelids are drooping and her body is heavy with a weariness that makes her feel oddly content. She sheds the cloak again and sits herself on the edge of their little bedroll, staring at Shakir’s sleeping face as if he held every answer to every question she ever wanted to ask.

I love this man, she thinks, and her heart doesn’t stop so much as it skitters dangerously inside her ribcage and seems to swell. I love him.

She loves the gold of his eyes and the dark sun-stained brown of his skin and his pale hair, which escapes its bounds as often as he does. She loves the sword callouses on his hands and the stubborn set of his jaw when he’s angry and the wry twist of his lips when he’s teasing her, for all her chagrin. She loves his deep, genuine laugh and his infuriating obstinacy and his undisguised love for his brother and his home and her.

She loves him and she’s lost in it, and this time when she scrambles back into bed she is more careless and wakes him almost instantly, his breath leaving him in a great, rumbling exhale as he pulls her into his arms.

“Sihai?” His lips move against the skin of her brow, his voice still heavy with sleep.

“I’m trying to sleep,” she says, almost petulantly, and she feels the corners of his mouth pull up in a smile against her skin.

“Alright,” he says, placatingly enough to annoy her, but she’s lured by the warmth of his voice and his body and the tiredness that has sunk into her bones, and before she knows it she’s shifted her body to fit more comfortably into his, her head tucked under his chin. He’s asleep again immediately, so that she can press her ear against the hollow under his collarbone and listen to the slow rhythm of his heartbeat.

This is the very height of stupidity, and he doesn’t even seem to care overmuch. That in and of itself inexplicably endears him even more to her, and she thinks maybe she understands a little of his love for the desert.

Closing her eyes, she lets herself be lulled by the steady pulse of his heart, and lays to rest both herself and the foolishness of it all, at least as long as they remain in the desert’s protective embrace.

Perhaps there is a little room here for stupidity.