Give Me Love Pt. 03

*And it's been a while but I still feel the same/Maybe I should let you go*

"Call her and be done with this."

This from Ubbe who's grown frustrated with Ivar's increasingly mercurial moods, after what was supposed to be a simple discussion regarding a potential client dissolved into near violence.

*It's not so simple*, he wants to tell his brother, feeling the anger and longing twisting in his gut. *Not so simple at all.*

So he bites his tongue and stares daggers into his brother's retreating back.

He should never have said anything about it. About her.

He wants to say he doesn't call because he doesn't have her number, and the chances she's kept the same one after all this time are slim to none, but there's more than just that.

If he's honest with himself, which he is, even in his silence, there's fear in him - fear that all the past hurts and regrets will grow so bright and blinding that he won't be able to see or feel anything else beyond them.

And fear, as well, that they won't, that it might be exactly as it was before she'd run off and left him. They'll return to strawberry kisses and bourbon-laced sighs, and pretending that love hadn't found a home between them.

He turns to the internet, of all places. Finds himself typing her name into the search bar on Youtube late one night a week after seeing her at the cafe, because isn't everyone on Youtube these days? And he finds her. He's surprised at how easy it actually is.

There are several videos of her, recorded over a number of years, the last of which was posted 3 years prior. Something about that bothers him, but he doesn't want to think on it right now. Instead he scrolls through her page. Tries to piece together her life in the time she was away through thumbnail pictures and colorful stills.

He sees her standing at the edges of spotlights...

He sees her in empty rooms...

He sees her surrounded by a handful of people...

He sees her standing in front of millions...

He sees her alone...

It's an unnerving progression. Unnerving because he knows her, but this life she's lived is foreign to him. Everything she'd been, everything she'd wanted to be, has been captured and recorded for the whole world to see and replay.

And it had ended. And there's no satisfaction in him at that knowledge.

His hovering thumb taps at one of the most recent videos. It's her, standing center stage in an old theater. She's dressed in a red gown and she looks peaceful and elegant.

Music swells and fills his darkened room. It's mournful and bluesy and strangely familiar. And then her voice begins to fill the space around him, just as he remembers it, just as he'd been imagining it, though he'll never admit it out loud. And he listens. Feels the echo of her beautiful voice in the very marrow of his bones. Feels it poking and sticking and prodding at things he's tried not to think about - like his loneliness or the her-like shape that haunts the shadowy corners of his bedroom.

He hurriedly exits out of the video, somehow both anxious and angry. With her. With himself. With Ubbe for even suggesting he call her, for giving what had been just a thought life and breath.

However, anger and anxiety don't follow him into his dreams and he wakes a few hours later, sweating and hot, his cock heavy and hard in his hand where he's managed to work it into his sweats.

Of course the dream won't let go of him. These ones never do. So he strokes himself, bites down on his tongue to stifle his desperate moans, even though there's no one here to hear him. Lets his mind pick up where the dream left off...

Her above him, sinking down on him, her slick walls embracing him, pulling him deep and deeper still; the taste of her slick on his lips and tongue and his fingers digging into her thighs; the light in her dark eyes as the pleasure winds and rolls through her; the way she arches above him when she cums, head thrown back and gasping out his name as her cunt squeezes him, sucks at him, demands his pleasure in return.

And he cums like this, with this image in his head, grunting and huffing and soaking through his sweats, the pleasure burning through his veins. Then lays for a long while trying to catch his breath, trying to bring the world back into focus. Trying to ignore the sound of her voice in his head. And still wanting.

He'll call. If only to say he tried. But, not tonight.

Not tonight.