You told me that my eyes were like verdigris, green flayed bright over hidden rust. It was not an insult because it was the truth, because you looked at what rested behind my eyes and their expressions. I knew that you had watched me closely but I knew not what you had taken from the experience, or what you saw. My hands curled against the wrought iron railing that curved gracefully around the edge of the balcony, serving as barrier and support alike as it anchored this small platform to the house. Jasmine vines ran up the walls and sent the scent of midnight billowing up to me with the wind. I inhaled it and closed my eyes briefly, feeling your scrutiny but for the moment unable to meet it. The warmth of your arm brushed mine, so different to the coolness of my own skin that remained so regardless of time and weather. It opened my eyes and closed them again in a sensation not unlike the sudden thrill of discovery. My grip upon the balcony rail slackened, and then tightened again, and I knew that you could see the slight flash of bone beneath skin in the whiteness of my knuckles. I consciously forced myself to keep my expression blank and even, but I knew that you would not be fooled. Not this time. So many times before, this charade had been successful, but tonight was different. We were different.

I felt you move behind me and instinctively, I tensed, until the light pressure of your fingertips at my waist caused me to lean back against you. There were times when I hated the fact that you knew me so well as to quell me with touch. For the most part, I did not like being touched. It was too revealing, it left me too naked, too soft and exposed, like an outer shell had been removed or damaged. I did not like it when anyone touched me without my will in the matter. I did not like the rawness of that intimacy because I was so responsive to it.

You were an exception to that rule, as you were an exception to so many others that I had sworn to myself I would never break. They rested shattered beneath your steps now, those rules, like old dirt beneath your feet. You replaced them with the promise of something infinitely more solid, more capable of lasting: yourself. Even if the threads that the dance between us hung upon occasionally pulled taut, or trembled under the strain of the weight that they had to bear, I knew that they were there and that was enough. Sometimes you would tug at them, just to test whether they would still hold us, to see whether I was still there. I did not blame you for this, for my tendency to disappear into places of thought where I could not be followed occasionally reared its head. But I was always there in some shape or form, and I think you knew it. I was never truly gone, only divided between realms.

But for this moment, we were here, the night like soft charcoal smudged around us. Two figures in the ink of the darkness, spilt into by the light of a few candles left lit in the room behind us. The bed was in disarray, for you had arrived without warning and I had woken with a start, throwing off the covers to answer the door and let you in. I had known it would be you. Of course I had known. We always knew, both of us.

I felt the warmth of you press against my back, the reassuring weight and heat of your fingertips. Slowly your arms moved around my waist, and I curled back into you ever more, secure here even as your touch conflicted me. I wanted your touch. I did not want it. I wanted the nearness of you even as my tension hummed light over my skin at allowing myself to be so vulnerable. Then your lips were there, soft at the nape of my neck, and the night sighed with my surrender as I turned to face you. Your hand found my face and looked into my eyes, and I knew that you were seeing the rust on my soul; the parts broken and eaten away by time that both of us marked. But you smiled, as if there were no shame in what I had become, what I had been gradually forged into by my own hands and those of others beyond recall.

I would have done a great many things to see that smile, again and again. You could have used it like a bullet, as a threat or as blackmail. But instead you gave it to me freely and often, and every time it stole a piece of my self-restraint, eroding the membranes of my caution, my hesitation. Whenever I thought of you in our time apart, I tried to think of you with that smile touching your lips, for it brought me home in a way that nothing else could.

My forehead rested to yours of my own volition, and for a moment, I heard your breath catch. Nigh imperceptible, but we were close enough now that not a nuance was lost to me. It was rare that I initiated any sort of touch. You were always the advocate, always came to me first, gradually working away at my discomfort until I yielded in quiet. I knew enough to know that you did not resent me, but hoped that I would learn the language of touch on my own. I was trying.

I heard you whisper the word verdigris as you caught my gaze again, but it was with a soft reverence that is rarely captured in living form. Such a tone is like quicksilver, like liquid; too soon grasped, the sooner gone, but I yearned to hear it again, as I yearned to see your smile reappear. I made a memory of the moment, for fear it would never come again. Us, the candlelight, the jasmine, the heady scent of you and your pulse beginning to race and drum beneath the surface of your skin. It was raw. It was touch. I should have been terrified. Perhaps I was. I know I was.

But that was the night that I knew it did not matter how many times you touched me; how many times you came as an apparition at my door in the middle of the night, waking me from my bed to say everything and nothing with your expressive gaze. I would always want more.

Once was never enough.