you're too young & eager to love

I feel like ~writing~ today. I love days like this. I've been reading a bunch of Joyce Carol Oates lately, so I'm trying to take some suggestions from a pro and write a piece that has a legitimate purpose/end-goal. With a motif.

Which I think I did well in the beginning, and then I lost sight of said end-goal. But oh well! I may finish this/do part two another day (since it's a bit obvious that I was trying to transition into a new section at the end).

Inspired, somehow, by this face and this clever expression - https://speakerdata.s3.amazonaws.com/photo/image/837398/Famke-Janssen-closeup-wallpaper.jpg

Can we get a "hell yeah" for a 1492 word count and hearty paragraphs?

I don't know what to say to account for my changing tenses though.

--


I just found a friend in one of your lies. – The Early November



As a woman still on the brink of girlhood, Augusta had let her hands linger in all the right places – she had swept her fingers against Baldric’s arms, digging her short nails into the hard muscles beneath his skin at the end of the day, till he groaned from the comfort of it. At formal dinners, she kept her fingers beneath the table, her palm warm on his thigh. In the cloistered heat of their bedroom, she wrapped her hand around the pillar of his masculinity and took him deep inside of herself. He liked to batter into her bones while her nails traced against the backs of his shoulder blades and her thighs ached from the force of being stretched open.

When he wasn’t looking, she used her hands to sort through the papers on his solid-oak desk. The wood so thick and heavy but improperly shined. (Baldric, she learned quickly, was not one for taking care of his things. Always, there, in the back of her mind, Augusta would wonder when she too might begin to collect dust.) He wasn’t well organized for a Chief Minister. He scattered lists of plans, scrawled in his sharp olive ink, alongside architectural diagrams, edits of upcoming speeches, documents still pending approval. While her husband busied himself around the quarters of his bustling estate, courtesy of Maximus’ generous dowry, Augusta folded herself into his high-backed chair, her long legs drawn close to her chest, her fingers grasping at papers as though she might inherit their knowledge through touch alone – ever envious of those who read braille.

She keeps her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, bare toes curled in, eyes hungry with their curious amber tint. She’ll have only half an hour at most for these clandestine moments, and she’s continuously mindful of the servants that slither like serpents around the halls, lacking loyalty for all but the Minister. She thinks of them as spies, of spiders, hungry to catch a prize for their master. She thinks they distrust her with all the loathing of petty beasts. In this way, she admires their intuition.


Admiration! For her husband, who is nearly half her senior, but surprisingly adapt in the world of politics. He has a clever tongue, but he uses it too frequently. He lacks the skills of a great orator, preferring to speak above the tide rather than use its softness to force others closer, to concentrate and focus their attentions on his words. But, still but, he is not unkind – not in the way that her father and brother had been – and he looks at her with clear, comprehending eyes. He doesn’t mind her intelligence, he does not think it a hindrance, and he dictates notes for her to record in her neat, eligible writing. (He likes the sharp cut of her A and the way she curves her B. Baldric fancies this appropriately symbolic.) He approves of her, but it’s her silence – and how quickly she learned to adopt it – that he admires best. She knows what to speak of and, now, what to keep inside her mouth, caught and braced behind her teeth.

There’s a maid with red hair that isn’t a maid. Augusta has not seen her clean once, although she wears the standard milkfish-grey uniform, modestly cut at the thighs and buttoned to her small collarbone. She has doe eyes that are framed in golden-strawberry lashes and a smile that is too sly – a quirk of her mouth at the corners – too impertinent for her station. Stitched above her heart, embroidered on the functionless pocket above her breast, are the initials BR in hunter red. In the future, Maximus will order all preternatural service members to carry identification cards with them while the stitching will be replaced by the pink-white burns of brands on the forearms. A process more efficient, more permanent, and more difficult to hide. For now, the scarlet initials are meaningful enough: she is not human; she is a member of the Reinhardt house staff; she is her husband’s property.

In more ways than one, Augusta surmises, watching the lithe limbs of the girl as she walks by. Most servants keep their eyes down in deference to their betters, but this one lifts her gaze high enough to land, like a palpable pressure, on Augusta’s jugular whenever she sees her. There’s a weight to her small steps. A sensuality to her hips that roll and shift beneath her uniform, beckoning. The doe doesn’t know it, but Augusta admires her too. She finds her brazen behavior refreshing. In a home secluded from the majority of emotional attachments and genuine relationships, it’s curious to her, too, that a shifter would find pride in bedding the Minister. She knows from her childhood that men have long held dominion over others through the force of their will but also their need to claim with their cocks. It doesn’t surprise her that Baldric is no different.

It surprises her that the maid acquiesces to the invasion. Revels in it, even. As though Baldric’s glory might rub off on her in the process and cover her in a defensive sheath. A gilded prize to be polished and protected.

Augusta watches her turn the corner, hoping the impact of her gaze lingers, and considers her options. Over dinner in the formal dining room, her eyes on her husband, she keeps the secret on her tongue, as sharp as salt, and drinks it down with a mouthful of bitter wine.



Radomir tells her, with that familiar rabid gleam in his eyes, that her name is Maeve. From what he can smell of her, she’s more prey than predator.

“A good meal then,” Augusta quips, stroking her hand down his arm, her fingers slow and smooth against the coiled muscles and raised veins beneath his skin. She means it as a reward for the information, as she does the closeness of her body.

It is late, and he is still new to the estate, still suffering from the years in the pit and the scavenging of his mind. His presence had unsettled Baldric, the way that men of power are often unsettled by the presence of brute strength. Negotiating him into a servant’s room adjacent to her own had required a number of sacrifices on her part. A pattern of bruises that peppered her pale skin. A tearing between her legs. Accusation-laced insults into the shell of her ear. But where the shadows are the thickest, she presses into him anyway, all but swallowed by width of his body. He can feel the heat radiating off of her and he can smell her husband’s sweat on her skin. His seed between her thighs. The animal inside of him gnashes its powerful jaws.

She touches his full mouth with her fingertips, silencing the growl at the back of his throat. “Will you find a way to handle this for me?”

“Of course.” He is surprised by the question, she knows, by her need to even ask in words.

“But it must be discrete. This is not the fighting pits.”

“If you think I would compromise-”

“I like this one best,” Augusta tells him, touching the tribal pattern of ink curving beneath the sleeve of his shirt on his left bicep. “It suits you.”

Her fingers feel like a brand, like a contract.



Eventually, Augusta will not have to hide. Eventually, she will her curl her weight against her husband as he sits at his desk, overlooking the papers, offering mild suggestions for improvement – always suggestive, never critical, without a tone of betterment in her voice. Eventually, she will have her own desk, secluded and separate from the compounds. An estate that is simply a house. A seldom-used (but greatly loved) home that is guarded by the sharp, perilous cliffs of the mountains in the West. A half-moon scar low on her stomach but also a title far more becoming than wife.

She will keep her hands to herself for the most part. As an adult, she is tall and razor-like – much in the way that Harrow, too, is a blade inside a suit – and she has stripped herself of feminine softness. Her jaw sharper than when she was a girl, her mouth too thin to kiss properly, her breasts high and natural but small when cupped by a grown man. The butterfly-softness of her wrists flattering the slimness of her shoulders and hips. A slender body, but a firm one.

Boyish and too hard, too like an athlete’s, Harrow had told her once, unsurprised in the aftermath of her miscarriage.

But, like birds, her hands flutter when she speaks – soaring down by her sides, fingers dipping in the air when excited and slicing when angry. She speaks more with her hands than her voice – her voice hardly rises, forever even-toned, curiously absent of inflection, dipping only into purrs and whispers when the need suits her.