The Unchaste

The Fight

He never came upstairs. She never went down. And they both avoided running into one another with every conscious effort of their beings.

It was a silent understanding, to not contravene each other's retreat in this state of utter duress. And though Delilah had not abandoned the attic since the moment she had stepped here, he did wander up. To sleep, to fetch the papers. The books. And sleep, again. He ate alone, downstairs. With Norris and Brent and others perhaps.

But beside all that, Delilah had not known a human who slept lesser.

He ambled into room sweat-slick_ It did make Delilah wonder at his vocation_ and fell on the couch, passed out. Three hours following, he would stir once. Fifteen minutes past that, he used to be up on his feet, running his fingers through his hair as if to wring off the remnant of sleep out of his head. It was strictly like that, as if he had been timed like a clock work.

And while he slept three hours a day, Delilah slept thirteen.

It could have been a dull affair afterall, to spend such long, lethargic days alone with not a word reciprocated, or only so few_ and it could have driven her to the end of her sanity but it didn't.

He had his ways to make her feel that he wanted her close.

When she asked something of his books, he was always so willing to explain. When she didn't ask him anything, and didn't look in his direction on his entering the room, sparing not a breath to his admission, nothing_ she always felt him sending guarded glances her way, as if to estimate her mood. To gauge if he had done something off beam.

A little curious. A little worried.

It was a personal adventure to Delilah, extracting such reactions from him and sometimes, she spoke very less when he was around right on purpose. She laughed ruefully when he became wary of her silence.

However.

This custom somewhat changed the third night, when Delilah was floating ephemerally in her sleep, not yet into the depth but much far below the waves, when she felt the bed beside her dip under weight.

Puzzled between her trance and the real things, Delilah surfaced her sleep after several long minutes and was stunned to find him asleep beside her on that limited, coarse linen-ed bed. Tired looking and dressed. It was such a tight fit. They were only sparsely not touching each other. The reserve was as nominal as where the sea merged into ocean, became ocean.

His heat was palpable. The perched ghost of ungiven contact was as real as the touch itself could have been.

Was the couch that uncomfortable?

So dead to the world, so vulnerable_ not even his lashes fluttered when she caressed them and she had no heart to chase him off his own bed. No right to do that. Besides, counting the many indecent things they had been into together, was sharing a sleep not something very, very much inconsequential?

Oh, but, no.

It wasn't.

It was a far, far more intimate an offense than any of the transgression formerly made.

Yet, in times such as these, when sleep was as overpowering as death, and nothing much mattered as long as there was tranquility in the air, whispers kept low, secrets safe and heart steady_ one could close the eyes to those prohibited, proscribed norms of history. And one could pretend, pretend and believe that not all sweet things done in the dark were corrupt.

Some sins were merely sacred.

So she fell back into the slumber watching him sleep. And the lane of her dream fell somewhere through the scent of his sweaty body, half blossomed roses and his cold, pale skin.