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He hears you. He hears you from outside. Pierrot’s boots are planted at the threshold just outside your apartment—like he’s simply a shadowed specter who quivers with unsuppressed ecstasy at knowing that just on the other side of the wall is you, you.
And even though he hasn’t stolen past the door, he can still hear it. Your heartbeat. Its cadence is steady, dependable—the metronome to which he can pace his entire existence.
You’re not expecting anyone, not planning to go anywhere, he knows, else the tempo would have quickened half a beat. Your steadiness means no one has touched your evening. It’s still waiting there, pristine. For him.
Pierrot tilts his head, listening harder. Each muffled beat reaches him like a prayer to a saint.
There you are.
There you are.
There you are.
It tells him more than you know. That you are seated now in your living room. That your breathing is even. That no smile pulls at your mouth. Ambient noise notwithstanding, there’s only that soft, steadfast rhythm.
His fingers spasm at his side. Pierrot imagines pressing his palm flat to your sternum and feeling the cadence that roars beneath it; imagines lowering himself to you and letting the sound travel through him until he cannot tell where your body ends and his begins.
Or maybe he’ll settle onto your couch, and you’ll crawl onto him, and he’ll yank you so close that the score of your heartbeat will be what echoes in his own chest. And he’ll make it speed up—it always does when he’s close. The anchored thrum of it crescendos into a delectable pitter-patter that makes his mind go fuzzy.
He barely registers it: someone else’s footsteps far down the hall. Another apartment, another life. A door hinge groans. Laughter follows. Pierrot’s pupils contract into pinpricks as the imagination enters his mind, unbidden. Someone else … someone else being the source of your heartbeats. The slow ones, the measured ones, the frantic ones.
The door to your apartment slams open in a deafening fortissimo. A photograph, hooked on a single nail in the wall, wobbles from the impact. He doesn’t notice. You startle on your couch, limbs folded together in the tableau of comfort. The corners of his smile creep higher at the way your heartbeat rattles your ribcage in surprise.
“Pierrot!” you gasp, hand clutching your chest as if that would dampen the sound that spills out of it. “What’re you doing here?”
Your words are crisp, clear. And drowned by the thunder in his ears.
Pierrot takes a step forward. Then another. Then, too many to count until he looms over you. You don’t shrink back, though, nor does your heart quell. You simply look up at him, head cocked, inquisitive and curious. Because you have no idea. You have no idea what you’re doing to him. You have no idea that whatever beast you had awoken in him long ago has never once yielded to a tranquilizer.
Not that he’d ever offered it one.
He couldn’t, not when your pulse is sweet and submissive and not when the way it tingles through his bloodstream catapults him into the throes of something that supersedes ecstasy.
Reason is a barbaric taskmaster; beads of sweat cling to his brow as he manages through shallow breath: “My dear … I …” As one leg buckles forward, he lurches nearer still. The plush upholstery of your couch swells between his fingers where he braces himself. “I can hear you.”
You furrow your brow. “What?”
Your expression, so open, so innocent, so impossibly unknowing of your effect, it almost—no, it does—untether the last of his restraints. Legs completely at gravity’s mercy, he, all six, monstrous feet and five, monstrous inches, topples down onto you. You shift in surprise but say nothing as his arms lace around your waist. Yes, yes, there it is, even louder, now. Your heartbeat reverberates against the ear he has just pressed against your chest.
Its volume causes the smile already splitting his face to twitch upward still.
And its speed causes it to sharpen.
“Pierrot? Are you—are you trying to listen to my heartbeat?” you wonder, shock threading through your voice.
His fingers tighten. Trying to? It’s the only music he wants to hear. “That melody … indeed. I could hear each note from the hall, but it wasn’t—” he grips you so tight, he worries you’ll break. He wouldn’t allow it, of course, but it’d be all right if it did … he could hold you together. And, and … your ribcage was only the instrument’s casing; so long as the heartbeat inside it still played for him, he would be content. “—it wasn’t enough.” The words come out jagged, like logic forgot to smooth them.
“You can hear my heartbeat from outside?” You sound like you’re trying to decide whether to be awed or bewildered. The roar in your chest tells him the emotions orbit each other fiercely.
He may have scared you, but there was a part of him that knew he’d do that from the moment he’d laid eyes on you. This love … it grows and grows and grows, pulsing through him until every part of him aches with it and until it’s leaking out of every pore. It’s like his own heartbeat. And he needs yours, more than he already has it. His hand slides at the hem of your shirt as he murmurs, barely a whisper, “Yes.”
Your breath hitches, and your heart skips a beat. The lack of sound causes his pupils to still for half a second, but its return has his fingers working again. Closer. He needs to be closer. This isn’t enough. His fist wrings a handful of fabric.
“That’s … good to know?” You open your mouth to say more, but he’s forced your shirt up. What’s underneath would interest him—should interest him. It’s intoxicated him before, but today, he has one mission.
Closer.
Thump-thump.
Your skin is warm, his mask is cold.
Thump-thumpthump-thump.
He can feel your heart vibrate against his head.
Thump-thumpthump-thumpthump-thump.
The beats seem to crash into each other in a frenzy that tells him he might be too close now. He’s practically buried into your sternum. The bone below almost seems to give. If he pressed any harder, he thinks he might slip beneath it altogether. He might put himself where the sound lives and never, ever leave.
Closer.
You gasp. “P—Pierrot, you’re hurting me.”
There’s a flash of regret, but only a flash as intention bows to desire. He drags himself back a fraction, no more than that, trembling even as he does. One beat. Two. Three. Four. He counts them in the silence that follows, and each one only makes him worse—more feverish, more frantic. They are proof. Proof that you are alive. Proof that you are here. Proof that you are his, his, his.
Your heart is racing now. Thump-thumpthump-thump. It’s delicious.
“Still too far,” he breathes, voice shaking. “It is beating right there,” he taps your chest as if he’s accusing biology itself, “and still I am kept from it.” His grip is like a vise now, he knows, and the chill of his mask must be so sharp it nearly burns. “I, I need to be closer. Closer to where it lives. Closer to you.”
You stutter at that, and so does your heartbeat. The micro change in pace nearly undoes him. He lets out something that sounds like a shudder. Then he cocks his head again, the bells on his hat scarcely making a sound.
“Do you not see, my dear?” he whispers in a tone that wobbles along a tightrope bridging worship and need. “Every beat of your heart calls for me. And I must—I must answer it.” And before sense can redirect him like a desperate ringmaster, he surges into you once more—careful for a single heartbeat, and then … not careful at all.