Keep Your Eyes Open – NEEDTOBREATHE
Dawn seeps softly through the thin curtains, the pale light brushing over the room like a secret.
Trey lies beside me, still lost to sleep.
He’s on his stomach, one arm folded under the pillow, the other stretched across the mattress, fingers relaxed. The duvet has slipped low on his hips, revealing a map of black ink winding over skin that moves with every slow rise and fall of his breath. In the quiet, I study him the way I would a piece of art. My mind starts breaking him down into shapes, the curve of his shoulder, the dip of his spine, the sharp edges that give way to soft lines. I could build him out of clay if I tried—learn him line by line.
Just above the waistband of his boxers, the tattoo trails across the small of his back, following the curve like it was drawn to be worshipped. His hair’s a dark, tangled mess against the white sheets, his lashes too long for someone who looks like sin and salvation stitched together. His lip ring catches the light—one flicker of silver—and it’s unfair how easily he wears both angeland villain at once.
I don’t know him. How could I?
And yet…we shared a bed.
His warmth lingers on my skin, a quiet hum beneath the chill of morning. It feels like those winter nights when the old storage heater would actually work, and I’d sit close to it, sketching until my fingers went numb. The ache in my hands feels the same now—a soft, familiar ache—but the longing behind it is new.
I’d sit here forever, just sketching him if I could. His face softened in sleep, all the chaos gone. The boy beneath the bravado. The calm beneath the noise.
My fingers twitch with the urge to touch him. To trace the sharp cut of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the steady rhythm of his breathing.
I want to capture him like this.
Unarmored. Unaware. Vulnerable.
The tattoos across his back pull my gaze like gravity. They’re all black, no color—each piece merging into the next with impossible precision. Skulls and roses. A dagger entwined with thorns. A scorpion coiled near his ribs. Angel wings stretch down one arm, feathers fading into the curve of muscle, the ink softening where it meets his skin. A spider hides near his shoulder blade, its legs lost in the shadows of a cross.
But it’s his neck that keeps me still.
The tattoo there is a barbed-wire crown, bold and raw against his throat.
Without thinking, I reach out, my fingers trembling as they hover above the ink.
I shouldn’t.
But I do.
The pad of my finger traces a single line of barbed wire, feather-light, careful not to wake him. The warmth of his skin hums beneath my touch. He stirs slightly, a faint sound escaping his throat, and I freeze, breath caught in my chest.
He doesn’t wake.
My hand falls away, curling into the sheets instead. My pulse won’t settle. I look at him and feel a pang of something sharp, bitter—an ache I can’t name. I’ve already asked too much of him. This stranger who took me in, who led me to safety, now burdened with the madness of my plea. I asked him to marry me. To bind himself to my ruin. Surely it was fever that gave me the courage to ask that—surely it was delirium that made him say yes?
Why, after already asking so much, do I find myself wanting more?
My whole life, I’ve been pious. Obedient. A vessel for faith, never for desire. I lived beneath the shadow of my father’s sermons, Gideon’s promises, and the endless noise of sin and salvation. And yet now, after one night of rebellion—one night where I fled everything I knew—why does this sleeping man unravel me so completely?
My chest tightens, a sob rising before I can swallow it back. I whisper the thought I shouldn’t dare think.Touch me.
My soul trembles like it already knows his hands.
He’s dangerous in every way I was taught to fear—and yet, lying here beside him, I feel safe. Cocooned in the hush of morning, the soft rhythm of his breath threading through the silence. Everything happens for a reason…doesn’t it? And maybe this, this beautiful, broken man, agreeing to stand beside me—even in name only—is some kind of divine mercy. A blessing sent to keep me from the fire.
Today, I marry him.
In name only, yes. That’s what he said. That’s what I must remember.
But my stomach flutters anyway, strange and unsteady, like a thousand restless wings beating against my ribs. It’s not the soft flutter of butterflies—no, it’s wilder than that. The kind of panic that comes when a trapped bird finds itself inside, beating against the rafters, desperate for sky.
He shifts in his sleep, a quiet sigh leaving his lips, and my heart answers with a foolish, painful thud.
