METHOD OF MADNESS ━ 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐬 𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐛𝐲 ¹

𝓋. 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓇𝓉𝓎-𝑜𝓃𝑒 : sun rises again (ed.)

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : follow you - bring me the horizon

⇄ ◃◃ ⅠⅠ ▹▹ ↻

v. thirty-one: ❝sun rises again❞

✵✵✵

Small heath, Birmingham

The night has conceded, the initial filaments of daylight tiptoeing into the heavens, and it is tomorrow now. Tommy and Mar's cavort has concluded, and the fortune becomes a reality; with his presence, with his face, with him asking if she'd be his. The world slips, for it is prejudicial, it is double-dealing, it is erroneous.

She was held to leave; that was the nature of their pirouette. Providence had cautioned Mar about wanting him, and had never permitted her to hunger for him, but she wished-for it.

And he had made her hope. Has given her a solitary edge on which to calculate, a slender abyss of anticipation, as he is a loathed entity. Nonetheless, a loathing affair is still something. The only article she eats.

In fact, that is precisely the reason.

That is the reason for the scantily clad limbs, one patchwork cot, and carcasses entwined closely.

Marianna stares out the window, reminiscing the gleam in his irises as they flared, the curving of his lips as their souls' fought wars against each other, and learns what such a fool she was, how effortlessly ensnared she is.

However, she welcomed it. She loves it.

"Are you still awake, Tommy?" Marianna murmured, her raspy voice penetrating the blissful cocoon that enveloped their linked forms.

She heard hears him exhaling then feel the air brush against the crown of her head. "I don't hear the shovels against the wall."

"What shovels?"

"The evening we stayed overnight in my bedroom, I didn't hear them either." Thomas continued slowly, his fingertips steadily toying with her honey blonde hair, striving to spend as many seconds as possible in her utopia.

Thomas figured he'd come to grips with time after all those years. He assumed he'd made amends with all of it, or that they'd discovered a means to exist side by side; not friends, but no longer foes.

But, by far, the span between the nighttime preceding and the dawn after is the most relentless, with each and every instant handed out without regard to their naked bodies draped within one another.