Please,” I said—Soa, had I ever sounded that young before?—and then again, “please,” but then I stopped, the words gone dead in my throat, because something in his face changed and he smiled.

He smiled. That was all. He smiled at me.

Soft and sorrowful and rueful, down to the bone. And beneath it all something foreign and strange that wrapped it all up into a humming sense of both expectation and regret that snagged something deep inside of me and broke it easily between its fingers.

He reached out with one hand, his roughened fingers dragging through the short hairs at the base of my scalp. His hand fitted itself behind my neck and I knew before he even did it that this was one of those moments that I would doomed to play over and over again in my head until the day I died. The look of him standing over me, the weight and realness of him there in the snow. The shape of him that I had memorized and tucked away long before this moment had ever come to pass.

And then he tugged me close and placed a kiss on the top of my head that couldn’t have been more of an apology and a goodbye if he tried.

[Bonesy’s “Black Heart Stomp”] (via moon-set) —