I’m nearly a week late, but I’m taking up the Three Word Wednesday writing prompt.  I just couldn’t resist that combination of words.  I mean, look at them?  Don’t they just beg for angst and heartbreak?  And what else do I write ;) 

The following is what I wrote.  It’s an excerpt from my current WIP, The Last Feather.  Love how the words kicked the muse in gear for this scene.  Do stop by the host site, Three Word Wednesday, and check out some of the other offerings! 

~*~

A millennium.

Give or take.

Ten centuries and four decades.

Give or take.

One thousand, seven years.

Given or take.

Three hundred, sixty-seven thousand, six hundred and four days.

Give or take.

I woke to a weak dawn reaching through the windows of the Queen Mary II and a warm, strong pair of arms wrapped around me. It wasn’t until the location of my last feather was revealed that I became brutally aware of time. It’s maddening, you know, to be so keenly aware you have no end.

I ignored time as I drudged through my existence. But somehow, when faced with the final certainty of an end I sat down and plucked my way through memories and journals to find out just how long I’d been trapped in my human form. Too long. I knew that, but knowing that grand total…

That morning after letting myself remember Adara’s death I stared out the frosted window and felt my sanity fray. I’d always laughed at Thomas Gray’s phrase, “Ignorance is bliss.” And yet, so true. I wished for ignorance of my age again. It hampered my ability to push on, to persevere to the end, when the end was so near. I tried to make myself realize that I was a year, less maybe, away from my goal. What’s a year to someone who’s lived so long?

A year. It’s that straw, that infinitesimal unit of measure that, while weighing nothing, has the ability to pulverize. I sighed, air escaping me so softly yet carrying so much. The body at my back shifted, a smooth cheek nuzzled across my shoulder blade and I frowned.

I didn’t remember the prior evening. Nothing. Not a whisper of it remained in my mind. The last thing I could recall, though it made me wince, was the blistering, not-hot-enough shower and my willing descent into one of my most painful memories. Beyond that was a clean slice that fuzzed, eventually, into my waking. It had been a very, very long time since I’d purposefully not recalled an event with such thoroughness. I shied away from the events leading up to that incident as well. No need to dig deeper into things that would tear at the thinning fabric of my no longer sound mind. No sense in taunting myself with the absences. The ones that did exist were there for good reason.

The arms around me squeezed and a soft leg slid up and over my hip. I stared fixedly out the window as I cataloged what I could. She. Oh yes. A woman. Her hips flexed and I felt the crispness of her pubic hair against my ass, her fingers slid down my stomach. The hot smell of copper, iron, and wood ash, so strong in my nose, cleared and I could smell sex. Musky, sweet sex, and. . .

Her fingers dipped over my mound and teased circles there. The brazen cockiness, combined with the little noise she let out just then. I knew who was in my bed. I just couldn’t remember how the young Laia arrived there. Her touch grew more certain and for just a moment I considered rejecting her.

“You tasted so good last night.” The words murmured against my neck were followed by a sharp bite that shocked a gasp from my throat. A rush of heat flushed through me and any thought of rejecting this newest lover in a parade of so many fled before the racing flames of my own need.

“Perhaps you would like to taste more,” I whispered, rolling over.

~finis….for now ;) ~