She’s in love with him.

She doesn’t have to say it. She tells him in little signals that never pass her lips, because she has no words to say what she wants to say, no matter how simple she tries to make it.

She tells him with her eyes. She smiles at him and throws emerald sparkles through the air in the hopes that the tiny fragments caught in sunlight that reach his cheek will pass the warmth of her longing through the afternoon air. She stares when she shouldn’t. She winks. She follows him with her eyes because, no matter what the rest of her says, her heart can’t bare to look away.

She tells him with her touches. She rubs up against him when they’re close. His body is hot, but hers is hotter, no matter the mood of the weather or whether the world says she should be. She wonders sometimes if she’s burning inside, because there’s a fire in her chest that’s so bright when he’s around. It makes her feel like her skin is at risk of catching aflame, and the only way to put it out is with him. With the pressing of her body into his, feeling his coat, his fur, his frame like a moving bundle of bricks wrapped inside a reassuring housing. She hugs him, rubs his back, touches him here and there and whenever she can manage, because the tingle of her skin only inches away is a rivulet of rainwater forming a trickle into a dry mouth. And she is so thirsty.

She wants to tell him with a taste. She wants to let him feel her tongue on his and to coat the inside of his palette in her caress, to coax murmurs from him that will tickle the insides of her ears. She wants to run her mouth over every inch of his body and drink him in like a dessert: a platter of tastes and textures that she’ll hold on her taste-buds until her world ends.

But she doesn’t need that to be drunk off him. He’s in her veins every minute, like a heady red wine that makes the afternoons blur into evenings into her dreams that are never worth waking from.

His room. She goes to it when he’s gone, so much that she’s forgotten the shame of it. When he’s at work, she finds time to pull herself away, slipping through the always open crack in his doorway and into the tiny wooden compartment he calls a place to sleep. It’s always been too small for him.

She throws herself onto the bed and soaks up the sheets. She turns in them, trying to catch the invisible bits of him left behind: his smell, his taste, his touch. She caresses his rough quilting like it might give her the texture of his body through osmosis, trading the particles of his frame into hers and making them together. She abandons her guilt in want. There’s only him there, and she never wants to leave. She convinces herself only by omission, and by remembrance of a when that never happened, that he walked in, might walk in, and find her there.

Find her there. Please, find her there. Find her tangled in the same-colour cotton of his sheets, writhing and tumbling in the remnants of his presence, giggling softly to herself because she never imagines he’ll find her there. Find her with her face buried in his pillow, breathing the scent of him, heat, warmth, heavy days and burning overhead and silence, the fragrance of his mane like sandy speckles that she can inhale and keep forever in her dreams. Find her there, wide-eyed and unspeaking when she turns, because she’s caught up in bed-sheets and desire, clinging desperately to the clump of softness like it’s his body, and her mouth hangs open because she can’t let it go no matter how much she wishes he might walk over wordlessly and replace that bundle of linen with himself, and then move, the scent becoming real, and warm skin on warm skin and closed eyes and the sun will be everywhere.

She dreams of him at night. When there’s no part of him she can reach but the heavy stock of his frame through the half-lit wall she imagines when her eyes close. He’s there, he’s always been there, and she holds one hoof to him, always, when her other is elsewhere. She imagines him meeting her, through the wall or on the grass or floating in nowhere. There’s too much real, and she knows what she wants can’t belong. Touch.

She remembers his touch through blurred film reels; shoulder bump, side nudge, heads tilted towards each other and pressing the sweat from each others’ brows like a secret seal that might hold them together, binding them with sunlight as the agent of fusion. She would hold him like that forever, and dream sometimes in the seconds of her closed eyes of more, pushing him and shoving him and showing him what it means, what she feels, what she needs from him. She whispers his name and it tastes sour on her tongue, but it’s a sourness she loves. She would drink the bitterest of spoiled waters just to taste him once, and to let him taste the word of his name on her lips.

During winter, when it was cold, she mulled over in her head the chill of her room. Too cold, she thought she might say, and clamber for warmth in the only place it was, because no matter the frozen bitterness of the winds, or the snow, or a cruel season that only exists to make the spring brighter, he was always warm, and she could feel it in him from miles away. She pleaded with herself instead of him, and drew the only conclusion from the coldness of her skin that her fur had failed to keep from her, and reached out longingly to the wall across the room, uncaring of the frost that bit at her, because her imagining was worth it.

One time. When she hated herself for having it then, her love for him, in the way it was so awful and wrong and something she kept inside like a guilty secret, which it was. There was a moon ablaze with silent stars, and the air seemed to crackle with an ambient jitter of lightning on skin that only she could sense. Camping. They shared a tent and familiar nods, shuffling past the always jarring shrillness of the fabric signalling their entrance, and found more comfort than there should have been on blankets thrown over rocks and dirt. Goodnight, he said. Goodnight, she said. But she couldn’t push him away.

Whether she pretended or remembered otherwise afterwards is something she can’t reconcile. The blankets were so thin she could feel his heartbeat then. It was like the rhythm of the forest around her, and the pulsing of the stars in the sky overhead, beating in time to a primeval presence willing them to life, burning brightness in perpetual birth. She felt it in herself, like she might explode and decay in an instant, and realized that in all of time, the possibility of her self lie in that single moment.

She touched him. His shoulder first, that firm, almost rock-like hardness of his bone underneath muscle, and the fur she ached for beyond reason and measure and forgiveness. Unspoken. And she touched him more, shuffling closer to him, ignorant of the space between them until it moved in obligation, and they were together, and something inside her unbecame itself.

There was no more regret for her want in that moment; only propinquity, and the gentle hum of his breathing, chest rising and falling, and her ear to his side, his shoulder, and there where her forelegs draped across his chest to feel it settle with every bit of air that past his lips. Lips that she wanted. So close, but only drawing the taste of him through his touch, through the soft bristles of his fur, through the size of his body that even she felt small against, so small she wished he would turn and take her and let her disappear until there was only him, and she would be absolved of her self, because that was all she had ever wanted.

She heard no give in his breathing, and so she moved from both hooves on him to one on herself. So selfish. But she couldn’t let it go if holding on meant the warmth in her touch that she had stolen from him might burn her forever. She rocked slightly when her leg moved, but kept quiet, hearing the subtleties in every hiss of her breath and changing it to match his, so there could be nothing but their closeness and the soft shuffling of the blankets as her hoof moved. As it moved and felt her and him at once, like two polar shores on a vast ocean. Hers, damp and dirty, and littered in debris from her visits—his strong and bare, and tempered by the sun, untouched by any but the caress of the sky overhead; and how badly she longed to be there.

His scent was all, thick and strong and in the air moving to her nose through the breaths she gulped louder than she could pretend anymore, and shuddering, and forgetting her potential volume because of him, as it was always him, and no wall between them to keep her hoof from his, and she found it, and shuddered in that moment, and buried her face in his fur like a sky of something washing away her vision and the tears that came, and they did come, so strong, so that her face was damp, and all of her was like that beach in the rain, ignoring the weather because it had pristine sand to imagine, tracing a figure in the hot white canvas that it could at last touch, burning herself from breathing it, breathing him, soaking in him and herself and bathing together in the delicious bittersweet sorrow of their one moment together even if only she was awake.

Down. Breath against his neck, and a stir. She was too tired to care. She had to give up then because there was nothing in her left to matter. He could have turned and she would have smiled at him with all the empty apology in the world abandoned, because there was no bliss like the blossom of her body in that moment, and never would be again.

But he said nothing.

She slept in a world away from her dreams that night, because she had been so close to them that they were frightened.

Once and never again. She would remember him in that instant forever, because he was hers then, no matter whether he knew.

She tells herself it will be someday, that she will abandon her foolishness or find a way to make things real again. She doesn’t know. He never speaks to her dreams. No gives. He’s always there, but he feels so far away.

Every night, he looks at her with the same look, that tears her towards him in a way she must hide behind her eyes.

Goodnight, Applejack, he says.

Goodnight, she says. She can’t bear his name. But it will be on her lips when she sleeps.