we were supposed to rise above / but we sink, into the ocean.

His fingers are pulling, pulling against her white wrists and she's resisting, resisting the touch. Because it isn't welcome, because it's wrong, because she isn't her sister and he isn't the man he should be, anymore. It's all not what it seems, anymore.

She came outside to feel the air on her arms, her face, her feet, her skin, all of it. She came because it wasn't calm—the elements, the wind, they were never calm. It was an onslaught and it burned the flesh of her arms and whipped the silk of her night gown behind her. The wind didn't caress, it wasn't the gentle touch of a lover or a soft whisper in her ear. It pushed and pulled and insisted because it was free. It was wild and couldn't be bottled and produced. It was nothing like her.

Sophia touches the railing with distant fingertips. The white gown is twisting around her legs, forming patterns on her thighs where a lover would never touch, catching the loose ends of her hair in a knot that soft hands will never undo.

She comes outside to feel something; something that isn't calculated or contrived or passed down through rank and order. The wind is something she can never control and she revels in it but never tries to grasp at it with her hands.

Earlier, this was earlier. She did this every night for the past month—since the little girl had been on board. She had begun to lose control of everything.

Now, this was now. Her fingers around the hard rail, her feet tapping a rhythm as she moved against the wind, pushing, trying to insist on her own. She puts a foot up, braces it against the thin rail and then the other, balanced, delicately. She's hunched over, braced by her hands that still grip the rails and she looks down through the clouds. The wind pulls and pressures and Sophia takes a deep breathe and just lets go.

Her feet steady her against the tilting of the ship and she raises her arms up and out, feeling the wind, testing it, asking it to just stop. And it does.

She doesn't open her eyes until she feels cold fingers wrap around her wrist. She opens them as she falls backward, backward and the wind picks up again with a hiss and she can hear it shout, "Stop, just stop" and she feels herself collapse.

He's behind her and he's pulling at her wrist but not saying anything, just insisting. Her head is down and she swears she isn't breathing when he says, "What were you trying to do?" and his hands are squeezing and he won't let her breathe, she needs to breathe.

So Sophia says, "I was trying to breathe," and she pulls against him, away, reclaiming her body. But he doesn't let go, Alex never lets go of anything and she wonders briefly how in this instance it's her that he holds onto so tenaciously. She opens her mouth again, raises her head and her arm to slap him but he catches that too and pushes while she pulls and they spin, like a dance orchestrated by the wind.

They spin, and spin and she can't see his eyes behind the hair in both their faces but she feels the slide of her bare feet against the cold metal of the ship and she understands that this isn't a dance because it's all control and finding the balance when there is none.

He slides her into the wall and he still pushes while she pulls and his face is so impassive that she looks away, wants to die. He makes her feel like she should question things—why is she out here, what was she doing, what is she ever doing? She's not complex enough for him and he's too vivid for her to comprehend without needing to shield her eyes against it.

He doesn't ask again so she doesn't tell again and they sit in silence with the wind hollow in their ears. There's a party somewhere below them, celebrating some minor victory that Sophia has forgotten; another minor detail that Sophia has excluded from her life because it wasn't where she belonged.

She wants to break because of it; the love of the wind, the feel of indifferent hands on her indifferent skin. She smiles because she knows that now even her skin has grown immune to him. First it was her eyes.

Her eyes are always the first to leave. Now, they move to the door before the rest of her body does and she tells herself she doesn't feel it when his fingers brush her hip as she passes. He follows her because she can hear his boot hit the door when she tries to close it behind her. There's music floating down the hall, piano and drunken singing and she doesn't feel like she'll ever laugh again when he stops her from opening the door to her room.

Palm over knuckles and it's just as simple as that. It's taken less to break her.

Once when she was little she had tried to solve a puzzle her father had given her. A simple scene of ships against a landscape but she couldn't get the pieces she wanted so she would force them in places where they didn't belong. Eventually they broke under her insistence and she could never complete the puzzle.

Sophia feels like that, in this moment. His hand on hers and she trembles because she knows that she can force herself into places she doesn't fit but will only end up incomplete in the end. She feels like, in this moment, pieces of her childhood are beginning to make sense. Why she hated complicated riddles, why her father could never get her to dress in silks, why she had a natural aversion to relationships.

She hates complications but they find her so naturally. She thinks it's ironic, all of it, her life, Alex, this situation. She thinks it's supposed to be romantic but it isn't. When he turns her, when he looks at her without really seeing, when his hands burn where they touch and in her mind she's on her knees and crying, crying for safety.

He doesn't kiss her.

They're in her room and the door is shut and she says, "You know, you know right?" But it's all in whispers while he slips the silk from her shoulders and it pools around her feet. He won't answer but she sees it in his eyes that reflect the glow of her skin in the light. He does know, he knows that what he sees in his mind and what he touches is not the same thing. They were never the same person.

The piano has grown softer now and there is no more singing as they lie on the bed and neither of them chooses to look away. She can hear the wind straining against the window and it taps a rhythm that his fingers seem to follow against the line of her throat, her shoulder, her breasts.

She closes her eyes and she breathes.