HOME | DD

Description
“Imagine you can’t… you can’t see me.”

Pluto quirked his head in a questioning manner, digging himself further into the sheets. We lay together in my room in the dark, the morning sun not yet up to break through the windows. Pluto never left my side now. I was still rather weak from the “incident”, so I hadn’t done much teaching lately. Sebastian said my soul might have been infected already, and we’d have to wait to see if I did any waltzing around on the walls or speaking languages I don’t know. But what scares me more is that the signs are not usually that obvious. They attach themselves to souls in secret. Believing they aren’t there is the perfect cover.

“Just pretend for a minute that you’ve never seen me,” I repeated, trying to think of how to put what I meant. His eyes, wide and beautiful and inches from mine, shut to block me out and I chuckled at him. “No, open your eyes.” He flashed his dagger-teeth and opened his eyes. I gently took his temples between my hands and stared solemnly into the depthless orbs. “Pretend that I’m there. I’m touching you. I’m with you. But I’m not feeling you. And you’re not feeling me. And you’re not seeing me. You would never hear me or know I was there. But I would know things about you.”

Pluto released a somewhat loud bark to quiet me, a frown etched deep into his face. I laughed and shushed him, the room suddenly so much bigger instead of just us. He pushed against my hands to nudge his head roughly against mine indignantly. “People are sleeping,” I mumbled as his arms weaved around me, strong and comforting and real and mingling. I nestled further into them, into warmth. “I just… I don’t know what I wanted. The question means nothing.”

The whole night neither of us slept. We just lay there in the dark, breathing together.

“Finny.”

“Yes?”

I wiped the sweat from my brow and dug my spade into the rich brown earth. “I believe you’ve planted these flowers too far into the ground.” I frowned as I pulled out a crushed clump of petals and stems from the hole, raising it up to show him. “That’s perfectly alright though,” I reassured. His depressed face was not something I could handle. Almost as bad as Pluto. Speaking of which, the freshly-bathed hellhound was having quite the time wriggling around in a patch of soil, leaving long and dark streaks on his once-clean skin. “Maybe you just used too much force pushing the plant in. Look, I’ll show you how to do it. Pluto, you should watch as well. It would be good for you to learn.”

So they both gathered around me and stared unblinkingly as I dug a good sized hole, gently removed the flowers from the pot by the base of the stem, lifted it over the hole, and plopped it gently into the ground. Their large, wondrous eyes never left my hands. “No pushing needed. All you need to do after that is scatter some soil around the top to make sure it’s covered.” I demonstrated this before handing each of them a pot of flowers. “I’ll work on pulling out the old flowers, you begin putting new ones in.”

Finny took his pot extremely gently and went to the other end of the flowerbed in front of the house. Pluto just grabbed my spade and started digging right in front of him with such determination. Nothing else in the world mattered but getting those flowers planted. I found myself smiling, an airy feeling taking over as I watched him, white skin hidden beneath layers of grime. He seemed to have trouble digging a hole and not a huge gaping pit. I laughed and pushed his hands away to fill in the hole. “When you dig it, just draw a circle first. Then push into the circle,” I explained as I patted the soil down. Our bodies were so close together. Our breath occupied a single space. Our heads brushed against each other. The electricity of our fingers touching as I directed the spade in his hands sparked and writhed beneath skin. Nothing else in the world mattered but getting these flowers planted with Pluto. Together we shoveled a perfect circle of dirt out of the ground. When I looked up, Pluto was already staring into my eyes. I realized he hadn’t heard anything I told him. We were the only two people in the world.

He licked my nose. Soft and small and protective and emotional. Never blinking. Never looking away from me. Hair entangling, foreheads touching. Never separating. No thoughts to encompass our actions. I leaned in to kiss his cheek, right beside his mouth, quickly and full of truth. Two seconds later- but time was fluid- he leaned forward to peck my lips just as I had done to him moments before.

And then we just stared at each other. Silent understanding passed between us, even though there was nothing to understand.