(A/N): A companion piece to part one that itched to be written. Tell me your thoughts, I adore them.
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...
There are things Skye comes back to:
The Quigley Woods. Words gritty inside her mouth. A mug from Boston. Songs that shake her out of her indifference, make her feel. Those little coffee shops rattling with charming oddities. Stories of scares that turned out to be enjoyable thrills. Photographs where her mother's hands are in hers and they are both beaming. Logic. Motion. Light.
It's all the same. All the wonder and heart-twist, all the love and loss.
There are things Skye comes back to.
There are things she come back to, and there is Jeffrey.
...
Skye is in college.
She dreams, often.
It's always about the same person, and everything is uncertain and fantastically, despairingly painful (is this falling in love? This inimitable plunge? This reluctant realization of the full extent of her feelings?).
In these dreams, Jeffrey looks like the end of one world and the beginning of another. Like a door cracked part of the way open. She wants to walk through to the other side. She wants to see what this new world is like. She wants rebirth. She wants him. Simply, stupidly.
Skye can't stop thinking about this, the way the night and all its neon lights plays with his face. She keeps waking up with a pulse faster than a bird's, and swinging her legs over the edge of her cheaply made mattress, and blinking at the wall as she tries to decide whether it's time to out herself, to expose her poor, engorged heart.
...
She does, finally.
But she doesn't just speak that day. She confesses. She admits the unadmittable: Love, being in love. With him.
She erupts.
...
The things she says to Jeffrey, with a pair of hands that won't stop trembling and a rather breathtaking amount of chin-lifted defiance, are awful and sentimental and burning. But she means every word, and this? This is progress.
She says things like, "Tell me to stop romanticizing you and I will refuse your request. Tell me to stop rhapsodizing you and I will tell you that I have always done so, have always been composing poems within your orbit, as if, like some kind of Jerusalem, all roads lead to you. Tell me stop idealizing you and I will say it's impossible for me, for a woman who is all blush beneath her sarcasm, all stomach-flutter beneath her carefully arranged neutrality. Tell me to stop and I will rebel. I will keep seeing you as you exist. Crackling with energy. Bright, like new ice. Flagrant. I will keep drawing upon language to arrange as close an image of you as I can possibly come. I will keep telling all the world how you are collision upon collision of forest and wind, endless. You cannot stop me."
She says everything.
...
After, they kiss and kiss and kiss and they are fire, they are radiance and chaos, they area universe unto themselves.
They.
Miraculous.
...
There are things Skye comes back to.
This (eyes that never fail to see straight through to her core; a laughing mouth; beautiful hands on a piano in sun-dusted silence);
and this (a small, privately lovely box of musical compositions telling of trees, star-swirls, phoenixes enflamed, and other rising things; a boy and a girl, a hedge, a meeting of souls, and a rescue from excruciating loneliness; them sprawled out side by side on an uneven cellar floor beneath the glow of lights strung everywhere, awash in amusement because parties were never something they excelled at);
and this (the moment it all became clear; the answering longing; the brilliance of synergy; the soft and glorious voyage of their hands and mouths and bodies toward each other; the searing inevitability of it all).
Jeffrey, always.
Jeffrey.