All The Fallen ~*~ Chapter 20 ~*~

She lay silent as stone, made of the finest granite, stretched out on her stomach, hand tucked beneath the pillow.  It was easier to match her breathing to the deep feigned rhythm of sleep while she ignored Tonya’s hand, resting light as a birds-wing between her shoulder blades.  A wonder how easily it was ignored, how things changed in the span of a heartbeat.  Her own heartbeat now thumping hard in her chest; betraying her true state of being.

Unmoving as stone, she didn’t stir as Tonya dusted her hair aside and brushed her neck with moist lips, telegraphing her desire.  Feeling nothing, wanting nothing, her skin did not heat, flush or prickle. There was no distracting hum between her legs as she counted her slow breaths and let her mind slip away, free of the entanglement she’d found her way into.  Drifting off to a place where Tonya didn’t exist.

Deaf as stone, she didn’t respond when Tonya’s breath whispered into the shell of her ear.  “Dana? … D?…Honey?  Are you awake?”  Then a small sigh as Tonya rested her forehead against Dana’s temple.  She felt nothing but the damp trace of a tear that was not hers, sliding down her cheek.

Because a stone doesn’t cry, doesn’t hear, doesn’t feel, doesn’t move.  A stone weathers…wind, sun, rain, and fictitious love.  Stands strong against it all, identical to the past as it is in the future.

She felt the bed shift and slope away from her as Tonya rolled over, got up and left, the soft scuff of bare feed on berber, retreating to the sting of silence and a hot shower.

The solitude of stone was in her, with only the faintest memory of a time when desire flowed at her core like magma.  How long?  How long had it been since she’d felt anything for Tonya?  When?  When was the last time she felt that ebb and flow of lust, fired in the cauldron of love, surging, then retreating into a tangle of arms and legs and the taste of sweat on her tongue?  Had it ever truly flowed?  Or had she found her way to the place with Tonya out of the sheer desire to be accepted?