you're too young & eager to love

Writing is a thing!

Which I have not done in MONTHS!

So, here's a little something, that may or may not be crap, but at least it's writing, ya know?

--

“My life was a storm, since I was born
How could I fear any hurricane?
If someone asked me at the end
I'll tell them put me back in it”




The water is warm and clear blue, unlike the sordid gray of the ocean, which stank of bottom-feeders and decay. The Brimgate Islands are known for this, of course–the idyllic points of paradise nestling within their lavender-colored groves, the secret waterfalls thundering into placid pools, the temperate breezes soothing the skin.

Augusta is unimpressed.

It is her typical state of being.

Radomir, however, appreciates the water gently flowing between his calloused palms, the beauty of the moment. Still, he is an intimidating man even here, submerged up to his waist, the sun warm on his scarred backs and shoulders. He’d shorn his hair for the journey, and the water runs down the sides of his face, clings to his eyebrows, his eyelashes, his mouth.

“You are a mountain creature,” Augusta says from the edge of the water, her legs half in the lake as she reclines on a mossy boulder. “You should be afraid of the water.”

Radomir runs a hand across the left side of his face, wiping away the wetness there. “What good am I to you if water scares me?”

“True. You are endlessly fearless, regardless of the terrain.”

He takes the compliment with a grin then shrugs in a mock-modest way. “If I am fearless, then you are terrifying.”

“The very essence of my appeal, no doubt.”



“Guest-right,” Augusta sneers, glancing over her shoulder at the two micipna the Magister had sent to accompany them on the day’s excursion. They wear the blue tattoos of their station on their arms, their necks, their wrists. The taller one has a peculiar mark below his right eye, almost a burn, except cerulean. They stay on the perimeter of the waterfall, stoic, silent, mute as dumb beasts awaiting an order, but she does not trust them.

“Guest-right is an ancient tradition. It dates back–”

She holds a hand up, cutting him off. “Don’t. I know the history lessons. Some traditions are worth leaving behind. This is why the Vries do not frequently have guests.”

He smirks. “You cannot assassinate your way through the world.”

“I can’t,” she says pointedly, and his laughter is a deep rumble from his chest.

“It is guest-right that protects us now, here.”

“It is the Vries name that protects us here. You do not start a political war by murdering a visiting diplomat from one of the most powerful families from the mainland. Guest-right is the veneer the Trifecta hide their fear behind. I am tired of these niceties.”

“Yet your brother still lives.”

Augusta rolls her eyes skyward. “Harrow’s own ineptitude will be his downfall. I cannot usurp him. Once he has finally shown his true colors and ruined Albtraum, I will prove myself.”



Her hair is a dark coil down the back of her shoulder, gathered into the intricate braids the wealthy women of the island wear to show their status. She is sun-kissed in the water, her usually pale skin turned golden by the afternoons in the sun, a flush of peach over the bridge of her nose and the curves of her shoulders. She is still young, no touch of silver in her hair, no fine lines near the corners of her eyes or mouth, but she has made herself sharp, like her brother, a woman of angles meant to cut. A blade.

When she stands in front of him, he is a whole head taller. Her hands skim his shoulders, feeling the old scars from his years in the fighting pits.

He must look down at her, but she is the one with the gaze of iron and steel. When she catches his face in one hand, her thumb digs into the tender spot below his chin. “Do you ever miss the fights?”

“I miss the noise sometimes. The waterfall sounds like the pounding of the stadium footsteps, the cheering. This island is too quiet. It’s all birdsong and chatter.”

“You were exhilarating to watch.” Her thumb traces the curve of his bottom lip. Not too long ago, his mouth had been hidden by the metal bars of a muzzle; emboldened now, he presses a kiss to the center of her palm when her hand passes across his mouth.

He does not know what to do with his hands now that she is in the water with him, as naked as he is, her silken dress the Magister had loaned her left on the side of the lake. She presses her hips into him, returns her hands to his shoulders, pushing her nails into the muscle there. She can feel his excitement between them, see the way his gaze is heavy with desire and shame and uncertainty. Slowly, as though she may be a viper about to strike, he moves his arms to circle her waist, the very tips of her hair touching the ends of his fingers against the small of her back.

She has to push herself to her toes in order to press her mouth to his thick jaw, near his ear. “Tell me about devotion.”

Augusta knows that he would bury himself in her if she would allow it. That his head would dip to her neck to breathe her in and he would lift her effortlessly, held by his strength and the water both, her legs coming to anchor around his waist. He would kiss her eyelids, her temples, dig his battle-born fingers into the strands of her braid and unwind them with the tenderness of a worshiper. He would show her his devotion if she did not insist on the words.

But because she has, he presses his forehead against hers, his voice pitched low, and he tells about the kind of loyalty that is born in chains. He talks about the scent of blood in the air and the feel of death between his palms and the taste of frenzy on his mouth and the many ways his violence took the shape of allegiance.

Back-posting here because I forgot to post two weeks ago somehow.

I’m trying to be creative after weeks of waking up at 4:45 AM, teaching three blocks in a row, and adjusting to learning three (THREE) new digital platforms for the school year, as well as an entirely new block schedule. Exhausted? You do not know the meaning of the word!

I’m trying to chug through! Like that little persistent engine.

The prompt is a carry-over from the last session, which was just “future,” but we wanted Linemell, and I like quotes, so you’re getting one.

But honestly this is a big pile of crap and a waste of both Hadassa and a good quote. It doesn’t even get to the future aspect.


“When love is sharp it outlives the body
[…] I could cut your throat with my love."
-Yelena Moskovich



After the exsanguination, you retreat from the city.
You used to love its broken, wretched landscape. The factories churn such smog that even the daytime could feel dark while the damp alleys—festering like open wounds with the destitute, the unlucky, the forgotten—would call to the eternal snake inside of you, the beast with its hungry stomach and sharp teeth. Stalking the cobblestone streets had thrilled you, left you bloody-mouthed and wonder-struck with the lure of the hunt; the city’s throats were a fount to be pulled, and you were rarely satiated. To some, you had been beautiful in your viciousness, your ruthlessness. Yours was a name alone that could ward off potential threats, and so maybe you had overstayed your welcome, had become too comfortable in Linemell. Maybe withdrawing from the city was unavoidable, in the end, because nobody was meant to find comfort for too long within its grim, stony walls. Even Ravenstone with its angelic bells chiming each evening is not enough to cleanse the city of its filth, although the church tries.
The church tries, but you cannot.
You are not used to being unable.
You had only known that the city changed for you, much like the house itself, and the sudden awareness had settled over you like the dirt of graves or a ghost’s caul. The Victorian with its aged wood and elegant columns, its wide sprawling gardens and large wrap-around terrace, stood mute and dull for all its grandeur once the Vannier House had its vengeance. Justice? Retribution? You do not know what to call it, the blemish that is your fledgling’s betrayal or the sacrifice that had been done for your sake or the bloody reckoning that had followed.
Baron had cried, of course. His wrinkled hands had clutched at you, and he’d sobbed with the frank indignity of the elderly. It had been Kostya that had pulled him away, worried that you might hurt the old caretaker when you arguably needed him most, but you hadn’t. You had let him kiss your hands, his mouth paper-thin and wet against your palms, your smooth knuckles. He’d even grabbed at your skirts, the elegantly stitched fabric looking vulgar when held so tightly in his wrinkled, liver-spotted fingers. You told him that the house was still to be cared for in your absence, but you think a part of him had known that you were abandoning the city. He would not see you again, not in his lifetime, but he would be like Argos, old and very tired, waiting with painful hope for your return.
You don’t pity him.






You wear your grief like a shroud.
For a while, it is permissible.
It is enough.






You cannot say their names, his or hers.
It’s unfair to the girl, but your pettiness and anger will not let your mouth shape the sound of her name. It is the anger that feeds you when the sorrow has passed, and you are angry at her too—her child’s face, her cherubic eyelashes, her rosebud mouth, and then her precociousness, her willfulness, her meek human heart that had beat a rhythm he had been unable to ignore.
What had she had, you wonder, when you want to torture yourself. What is it that made her so much more desirable than you? A wisp of a child, untouched by eternity. What was worth the betrayal?
And such a betrayal it was.
The core of you, the small black heart inside the creature you feed, the part that has been with you since Sindan, this is the part that cannot conceive of forgiveness. He had deserved his death, and maybe the girl had deserved hers, but you had deserved none of it. Even during the private moments where you have only your own company to lie to, you cannot seem to trick yourself into delusion. You want the fault to be yours, only you cannot find where the trouble began. You sift through your memories like a miner sifting for gold, and each time you are empty-handed at the end. You knew him for the selfish, hungry, charming, pitiless creature he was—he had mirrored you in many ways, this you can admit, but he had done such a grievous wrong, such a sleight that you could not comprehend.
It is the burden of motherhood, you think, the hidden fear of losing that which you hold most dear, the weight of a disappointment so crushing that it feels inevitable.






Some of your children become mothers, become fathers, become parent-siblings bound by the legacy of blood-work. You’re happy for them, but the happiness is a pallid, perfunctory thing, a feeling on the edges of your soul. Distantly, you can tell how ill-fitting motherhood is to Vida. She brings her typical aloofness to the role, and you seem to comprehend that she’s setting up franchises rather than forming a home, which is why she stays with you. Or maybe that too could be apathy. Maybe she’s happy to be kept in the fold. You can’t say. You don’t ask.
You become a quiet thing. Laith, still adoring, still enraptured, does not mind. He continues to wrap you in fabrics you do not wear. His talented fingers stitch together wonderment and dreams, dresses like stars, but they hang in your closet, unable to be admired by anyone. They hang like skin, like skeletons on the noose.
Kostya visits. You haven’t given him a gift in some time. He asks about the house, about the current caretaker, about whether or not you want to stay in this new city with its gray buildings and gray people. It is enough, it is fine, you reassure him. He looks at you like he misses something about you, but he doesn’t press. It’s not his nature.
“Have you heard?” he asks. “Gideon is stirring up the muck in Linemell.”
You think of your mercenary, your warrior, and a hint of a smile plays across your face. “He is holding the city, I trust.”
“He can do that much.”
“What is this muck then? Vida says he’s living in squalor, one of those condemned row-houses from the turn of the century. It’s to spite me, of course.”
“He’s hunting one of Ravenstone’s.”
This amuses you, but you don’t say that. Instead, you lift your eyebrows and glance out the window as though you expect to see Gideon there, rage-filled and resentful. “How do you know this?”
“You like me to keep an eye on him, so I do. Not often, of course, because he wants to prove himself capable in some way that might matter, but I check from time to time.”
“For me?”
He nods. It’s a simple truth, not sentimental.
“I doubt he will follow through with whatever scheme he has brewing. He’s always wanted attention, that’s what this is. But then … maybe it would do him well, siring another.”
“He is violent. It will not be easy.”
You want to tell him that nothing ever is, no matter how long you live. Eternity brings few rewards in this aspect. Instead, you shrug. Gideon is as he is, and you appreciate that consistency. Even his hatred reeks of love.

I am back-posting Monday's AWS (which was more of a catch-up/work on a pre-existing piece since I had Internet issues) now.

This is my attempt at world-building, playing with limited POV, and creating dialogue. I give you the Brimgate Islands (a wasteland, warped version of where the Caribbean should be in today's time) and the Outgan Trifecta, which have a completely different view of shifters and culture compared to the Vries. Augusta goes on a diplomatic visit and does her thing.

( to make a creature )

Another AWS session down! I've lost count. I think this might be 5.

Some context: I wanted to explore Despina and Orson meeting and leave a set-up for future meetings, the next most logical being her debutante party where the community is formally acknowledging that she's Maxine's legacy and the next in line for the Vannier Head-of-House position.

( for fate may hang )

Session three! ... three? Three, I think. Session # __ of AWS!
Needless to say, I am much happier with this week's results compared to last week's.

Some context: I wanted to keep this on Hadassa so that she's witnessing the event and thus does not know what's happened or what's going on in Orson's head. As a result, I think it can read like Orson just murdered poor Despina and is having a breakdown, but it's really that he's coming to terms with desiring her and struggling with his sense of self. So what do all good vampires do during times of existential crisis and blood lust? They go on a murder spree! While countless of victims may have died here, one of them was not Despina. Not yet.

I've read this like five times and I feel like I still missed some grammar issues. Tread lightly, I was under a time crunch, okay!

--

“Truthfully, I love you so much that I will defend you even from me.”
- Elías Nandino (1900-1993), from “Don’t Come Near Me“ translated by Don Cellini




Her dreams wake her before dusk. They are not good dreams, have not been good dreams for eons, and she comes to consciousness like a drowned victim struggling for air.

The house is silent or as silent as old houses can ever be; houses this old have a personality, a presence. They murmur and creak and whisper. The doors contain secrets, and the windows unlock memories. Still atop her mattress, a corpse except for the languid feline blinking of her eyes, Hadassa can sense rather than hear the noises of her home–the old floorboards and how they shift, the flaking of the gilded wallpaper, the rasp of the stairs, the rats scurrying inside the mostly empty pantry, the caretaker on the porch who waters the violet flowers lining the property. The sun is still a threat outside her barred windows with their heavy curtains, but she throws back her sheets anyway and slips into a silken robe the color of jade, belting it about her waist.

The sleep is still heavy on her. She rests one hand against her bed frame, fighting it, and eventually she can leave the room. Her steps are quiet and slow; she keeps to the shadows although all the windows are shuttered and the curtains drawn. The hallway is a mausoleum, the house a crypt. None of the candles have been lit, and there is no music from the victrola in the parlor. Outside, Linemell bustles and heaves, a booming crush of bodies and smells that dangerously beckon.

Hadassa is too old to be fooled by the punch-drunk promise of hearts or the temptation of veins. She ignores the hint of her hunger and steps more lightly now that the last urge to sleep dissipates from her bones. It is a privilege of her age, this ability to fight what comes most naturally to them, to protest against the organic call of her body and its desire to avoid the daytime hours. Passing closed doors, she can feel her children in those rooms, still dead to the world, so like statues in their stillness, but for a moment her heart overflows from their proximity. She has not had such a full house ever before, and there is a contentment settling over the estate now.

It is not until she reaches the bottom of the stairs that Hadassa becomes aware of a change, a difference. It is not a realization so much as a feeling. She turns her head to the left, waiting, some keen animal instinct making her alert. There is not a noise around her, but still she knows. Curious rather than afraid, she follows her intuition and is surprised to find Orson in the empty, unlit dining room. The windows here are covered by the same thick curtains as the rest of the ones in the house, but she cautiously eyes the hazy glow surrounding them. A sliver of the curtain has been left open, and the sun slices through the darkness, leaving a sliver of light across the floor.

With his head in his hands, Orson looks like a human again. Hadassa stands in the doorway, unnoticed, and studies him. He’s hunched at the edge of his seat, his elbows on the ebony dining table, his fingers gripping at his tousled dark hair. He’s closer than she likes to the light, and there’s an odd rawness to his right hand, the skin there the smooth redness of a fresh burn. She can see the long line of tension that is his curved back, the knotted, rigid muscles of his shoulders. He stinks of the city, of old blood, and his usually clean hands and clothes are dirty, stained. He has the scent of the grave around him, the kind of rot that’s internal and festering.

“Blood of my blood,” she says with her golden-amber voice.

Her voice startles him so much that he overturns his chair, and it clatters to the floor as he whirls to face her. His wolfish eyes are wild and dark, storming, and there’s blood in those eyes, blood on his cheeks. When he wipes his tears away, he leaves grit behind and stains his fingers more.

“Haddie,” he says, his smile shaking and feeble, and for a moment she sees a shadow of fear dance across his face before he veils it.

“What’s the matter?”

He shakes his head, and there is torture even in that smallest of movements.

“Has something happened?”

Again, he shakes his head but then gives a miserable laugh. “I am unwell, I think.”

“Unwell? Nonsense.”

Hadassa rights the chair and watches as he steps away from her, as he follows the curve of the dining table to the antique bar cart with its gold chrome finish. Orson has always been her least melancholic, her most fearless, her third progeny and in many ways her favorite after Nayeli, but Nayeli has been unbound for some time after leaving the fold many years ago. She has loved him for his viciousness, for his charming cruelty, for his selfishness that mirrors her own and teaches her justification and forgiveness. She has almost never seen him cry, never seen him tempted by madness or a desire for despair. He has been stalwart in this way, as inclined to this blood-life as any other natural born predator. It unnerves her, then, when he pours from the communal crystal decanter with a shaking hand. The blood he pours is old, fetid, the caretaker hasn’t yet replaced the previous night’s portion, but Orson drinks it anyway. He gags but upturns the glass, catching the last sluggish drops in his mouth.

“Tell me,” she says, her voice stern. “Tell me what has happened.”

He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His fingers are trembling. There’s a crooked desperation to the way he grins, and he gestures with his empty red-stained glass, flourishing it above his head like a drunkard in a tavern. “You told me once that we are most like gods, do you remember? We kill indiscriminately. We live long. We die only from foolishness or by our own choosing. Do you think we tempt fate, being what we are?”

“Who is to say what is natural and what is not? We could be the natural progress of evolution or an anomaly or perhaps the fates made us to act as a balance to the order of things.”

“Natural,” he murmurs.

“Do you think I have the arrogance to assume that I know any of this? I was not told our secrets. I know no more than what I know, which is that I am what I am.”

“And what if you regret what you are?”

This, more so than anything else he has said, concerns her. She hides it, however, and crosses the room to him. He lets her take his face between her hands and closes his eyes with a choked sigh when she sweeps her fingers across his eyes, the dark fine hair of his eyebrows, down his angled cheeks. She presses her mouth to his tear stains. “You have to tell me what has happened. I cannot help otherwise.”

His hands cling to her waist, knotting the silk of her robe, and he dips his head to her shoulder. He peppers kisses up her neck, breathes in the familiar scent of her dark hair, trembling while she strokes her cold fingers across the back of his skull.

“Orson.”

He shakes his head and clutches at her.

She pushes too far. When he can sense her inside of him and surrounding him, her blood calling to his, her will asserting itself, he pulls away. “No,” he snarls, feral suddenly. “Not that, Hadassa. Get out of my head!”

For a moment, she wants to press him. She could do it. He is strong, but she is stronger, and he has inside of him, at the core of him, only that which she gave away from herself all those years ago; she can always best those who are still bound to her. It is her love for him that she acquiesces to after a moment; she apologizes for the invasion by guiding him back into her arms.

“You must sleep,” she says finally. “You are tired. You cannot fight the day and not expect to suffer from it.”

“Yes,” he agrees reluctantly, weakly, but he’s pressing his mouth against her neck again, over her collarbone, pushing his face into the folds of her robe, trying to nuzzle her shoulder. The affection is tepid, automatic, a desolate condolence for his behavior, and she untangles herself from him with a scowl of revulsion.

“Let’s speak tomorrow then, when you are more rested.”

When he slinks away, it is with stooped shoulders and a bowed head. So like a fallen hero, his clothing crumpled and stinking of human sweat and human blood and human death, his hands and face still dirty with gore. Hadassa watches him leave, folding her arms across her chest to fight against the chill that runs down her spine. Watching him fade into the shadows of the house is like watching a ghost retreat to hell.

3rd writing session piece, and let's just call it a wash. I may be misusing this phrase. The point is that Luke and Haven deserved better from me today, and I did not rise to the occasion. So sorry, my darlings.

Here are two sections of a piece that are crammed together despite not fitting in ANY way. My brain broke.

--



Stay away from the ones you love too much.
These are the ones who will kill you.
- Donna Tartt




“I love you,” she says into his mouth, her fingers against the back of his head with her nails like talons gripping his neck. Luke swallows those words like he swallows her spit and the taste of beer on her tongue.

By the time he’s done kissing her, her lips will be swollen, but it’s the aching bruised feeling between her thighs that Haven will be most proud of. Haven is like that: she appreciates pain, she sees it as a badge, a thing to be carried, and the longer you can carry it the stronger you are. She’s been shouldering a series of sleights and heartaches and grudges since before puberty, so her endurance is impressive. It’s a mental thing, she knows, this ability to persevere and prosper despite hardship, to make lemonade from the world’s most bitter lemons. Not everyone has it. Sometimes, she has even doubted Luke. He’s not as strong as she is, which is why he’s always needed to be coaxed, to be lured, to be quelled.

After they’ve battered each other, pushing the boundaries of their spirit and their bones, she lays across him like snake-skin. Their chests are together, slick with sweat, and she’s still straddling him, her knees on the outsides of his thighs and chafed red from the cheap carpet. There’s that pleasant ocean sound in her ears from her heart and pulsing blood, but there’s his breathing too, mingled with hers. With her face turned into his neck, she can feel each breath he takes. She counts them until she reaches ten.

Haven tilts her head up and bites his earlobe.

It’s too hard, and Luke sucks in a hiss with surprise, jerking his head to the left.

She laughs, her grin like a knife against his jaw when she nestles back into his space. One of his hands strokes the small of her back lazily.






When she turned seven, Sam Elders took a Walmart-brand ice-cream cake from the freezer and sat it in the center of their kitchen table. It was a vanilla flavored dome of white and yellow frosting with rainbow sugar confetti decorating the top, and the summer heat was already causing the edges to melt because that was the year their AC had broken. Haven can still remember how loud the plastic protective shield had been when Sam had broken the sticker seal and pulled apart the cover. It hadn’t seemed right, the loudness of that thin, cheap plastic.

She could smell the cake immediately. Without a working air conditioner, all the unclean smells of the house had seeped to the surface, and the air was thick and stale; the cake was the first fresh thing she had smelled in a week.

“Good girls get cake on their birthday,” her father had told her, his voice only slightly slurred.

“I didn’t get cake last year,” Haven said.

“Well you mustn’t have been very good last year, but this year, this year you were great.”

Brandishing an old butter knife in one hand, Sam eyed a slice then cut out a piece of the cake. It was a thick triangle, much too big for a seven year old, with a solid inch and a half of ice cream between two layers of vanilla cake. Haven watched with a pang of disappointment as he cut the slice in half before flopping both pieces on separate paper plates. He took the larger of the pieces, then he pushed hers towards her across the table, and she ate the cake with her fingers.

“If I’m really good today,” she asked, licking the frosting from the corner of her mouth, “can I have another piece?”

“Two pieces of cake in one day? Nobody’s that good,” he said.

“I’ll have Luke’s piece then. He won’t care.”

“Luke isn’t getting a piece.”

“Why not?”

Sam had eaten his cake in three bites. He’d washed it down with his leftover beer, and he took another swallow before answering his daughter. “It’s not his birthday, for one, and for the other…” he shrugged, leaving the thought unfinished.

Haven eyed the cake. It sat like a beacon, melting in the center of the table. Her mouth was still cold and sweet from her slice. “He wasn’t very good?”

“When is he ever?” her father had responded with a scornful sneer, and even then Haven hadn’t been able to understand Sam’s disapproval of Luke. Luke was nearly two years older than her, still a child himself, but it was Luke who usually made her breakfast and made sure she washed her face and brushed her teeth before they left to wait for the school bus each morning. It was Luke who held her hand when they crossed the street, and Luke who made sure their brown paper bags were full of snacks that they could share during lunch time. If Luke hadn’t been good, then she didn’t know how she could have been.

Haven had wanted to save him a slice anyway (she knew her father wouldn’t remember the cake by the next day, and it would sit in the back of their leaky freezer until it became freezer burned and inedible), but Sam had tossed the whole thing into the trash with a look of disgust. He’d left the kitchen drinking his beer, and Haven couldn’t remember the taste of the cake an hour later. It had felt like something to mourn, but she hadn’t.

Second writing session response! Feeling pretty good about the nice cut-and-dry, somehow miraculously-completed work from today, even if it's so sweet that you're likely to get a toothache from reading. Tread carefully.

--




“In your mouth,
I want to be laid to sleep.”
– Martina Werner, tr. by Rosemarie Waldrop, from “Monogram 23”



The poetry had been his idea.

In truth, all of the reading had been his idea.

Abigail had said yes, of course, because he was the prince but also because she had wanted to prove something to herself even if she was initially embarrassed. Some of the words had felt funny in her mouth at first, and it was difficult to remember which shapes created which sounds. She’d had to explain, too, how she’d learned her letters a little as a girl until her father deemed it inappropriate, and then she’d spent her days with needle and thread or learning how to ride the gentle mares in their stables or practicing dance and art. The lessons had made her well-suited for court life, but she’d never learned to silence the curious part of her soul, the part that gave voice to her questions and longing, that asked for stories from the eligible courtiers, that rang with wonderment.

Gerhard had told her, later, that this had been what had first attracted him to her, and a small part of her had felt seen then, appreciated.

(It is not what will attract Renan. He will not see her for her intellect but for something else entirely. He will not need her questions or her curiosity, and he does not care for poetry.)

Now, that part inside of her has grown like a sapling, and she looks forward to their lessons together. He always has her start with a new poem.

“Would I were … s-steadfast … as thou art,” Abigail says haltingly and in a half-whisper, “not in lone splendor hung a-aloft in the night…” Her eyes are at the end of the tip of her finger as it trails a line of writing from the book open in her lap. It’s a small leather-bound collection of poetry, the pages crinkled from time, the edges gilded. She had admired its beauty before she knew how to admire the words within it, and the struggle of learning to read the small type had diminished her appreciation some, even if it had amused Gerhard.

“And watching, with eternal lids apart, like Nature’s patient sleepless Er-erri-era–”

“Eremite,” Gerhard says, without judgment.

“Eremite,” Abigail repeats, forming the word carefully. She looks down at him, his body sprawled easily atop the duvet they’d spread in the garden, his head nestled close to her hip.

“A recluse. Usually a religious one.”

She pushes aside his dark hair to better catch his eyes, and he grins at her in the boyish and suddenly affectionate, spontaneously warm way that he has. “How do you know all of these words? I can’t imagine crown princes meeting many eremites.”

“No, but crown princes have the best of education.” He gestures with his eyes back to the book nestled amongst her skirts. “Go on.”

Clearing her throat, Abigail continues. “The moving waters at their priestlike task of pure abso—ablu—ablution round earth’s human shores, or gazing on the new soft fallen mask of snow … upon the … mountains and the moors.” She stops her reading aloud, huffing, and glances up at the branches above them. This is her favorite tree in her father’s garden, her favorite spot. It offers shade most of the day, and the leaves are deliciously sage-scented while the small buds of violet and pearl that drift down on the breeze get caught in her hair, making her feel like a child again. There’s a peaceful buzz of activity amongst the branches as bees and butterflies flutter amongst the flowers and that too can lull her. Gerhard likes it as much as she does, and they’re given privacy because of his royal standing, which makes the afternoons hum with lazy intimacy.

“I don’t understand,” she says after a moment, watching a blue-winged butterfly rest atop a branch of cream-colored blossoms.

“You haven’t finished it. Sometimes you have to see the end of a thing to better understand it.”

“Why would you want to be as steady and unchanging as a star?”

Gerhard shifts beside her, lifting a hand to shield his eyes so that he can follow her gaze up between the branches. The sun is still high, and the stars will not emerge for many hours, but Abigail seems to be hunting for them anyway.

“I would argue, I think, that man has always fought for stability. To stand still. To resist change, which is of course futile, and thus there is the tragedy.”

She makes a soft sound of understanding and returns to the poem. This time, she reads silently to herself, her finger still marking her place. When she finishes, she closes the book, then drapes herself backward so they are side-to-side on their backs. Her hand finds his between the length of their bodies, and their fingers tangle together.

“So?” he prompts after she has stayed quiet.

“He doesn’t want to be a star in the sense that he doesn’t want to be alone in the sky, watching, but he wants to never change so that he can lie with his lover. He wants to feel her breathing, forever, and if he cannot do that, he wants to die.”

“Very good,” Gerhard says with an obvious note of pride in his voice. His thumb traces her knuckles.

“It’s sad though, isn’t it, like what you said about the tragedy of it all? There’s loneliness and distance in a star, and they might be constant and dependable, but they’re so far above us.” She pauses, thinking, “I don’t think a star’s steadfastness can be achieved on earth, with people, I mean. It’s just the poet’s dream, it’s a fantasy.”

“Sometimes dreams make reality worth living. What would we be without our dreams?”

She gives him that noise again from her throat, like a punctuation to his thoughts, a soft vocal acknowledgement and agreement with his ideas.

His hand slips from hers when Gerhard turns on his side, propping himself up on an elbow. They’ve circled like Chinese symbols so that his head is close to her feet, as hers are to his. She’s barefoot, and he ghosts his right hand along the shape of her foot before slipping his fingers beneath the hem of her dress to stroke her ankle. In return, Abigail shifts to rest on both of her elbows, her back slightly arched, her hair flower-studded and a golden tousle around her cherubic face. She smiles across at him. He loves the feel of her bones beneath his hands, loves the softness of her skin, the easy honey-sweetness of her on days like this, and she opens herself always to his advances—to his touch, to his inquiries, to his mind. She is becoming, more and more, a bright spot on an often mundane landscape.

When he dips his head, he kisses the bump of bone by her ankle then the side of her calf. He pushes at her skirts to expose more of her skin, and Abigail laughs, shoving a hand into his curls to pause his exploration. “My father,” she says. “He can see straight into the gardens from the corner window of his study.”

“I’ll order him to look away.”

She laughs again before sliding gracefully to settle on the sides of her knees while adjusting the fall of her dress. Gerhard mocks a groan then, defeated, nestles his head into her lap, kissing the lace-pattern of ivy leaves intricately sewn into the gown’s fabric. She twines her fingers through his hair, a blush of color turning her cheeks the red of berries.

“Later, my prince,” she promises, “when we can sleep amongst your bedsheets and not rise again until the dawn peaks. We’ll make even the stars jealous.”

Abigail is true to her word.

His bedroom always smells of parchment and ink, of candle wax and fresh autumn apples, of ash from the fireplace and expensive leather. His bed is large, a goose-down mattress befitting royalty, and the sheets always feel clean against her skin. She likes to burrow beneath them like some woodland creature, losing herself against the bedding and his coltish limbs, wrapping and winding herself around him until she cannot decide where she begins and he ends. When they’re satiated, she’ll curl against his chest and let him do the reading, sometimes mimicking the shape of the words quietly to herself while she traces his ribs with her nails.

He, too, can be her tree in the garden, can lull her with his rhythm and his cadence.

Last of the responses to the warm-ups, and first of the Monday writing session responses!

--

For reference: https://dresslikeaparisian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Victorian-collar.jpg

“Hunger
stays with me
but it is not original with me.
Hunger sleeps in all things mysteriously.”
- Decreation, Anne Carson



It is her slender neck he thinks of, how he’d like to see it bound by a high lace collar with delicate mother of pearl buttons running down it, traversing the entire length of her spine. He imagines opening those buttons, exposing the untouched skin inch by inch, peeling away the fabric to study the constellation of freckles across her shoulders before sinking his teeth into the pulse point at her throat. She’s as pure as the winter snow, he knows, unspoiled by the needs of the flesh or the desires of man—he can smell that on her always, an untainted lily-and-sunlight freshness, the kind that most children have, a scent that’s light and desirable and rare.

He’d been hard with her earlier, he knew, using words like barbs to gauge her reaction. How many months had it been though since he’d befriended her now, since he’d put on his congenial mask? How many nights of quiet stalking from the shadows? Of intolerable banter and exhaustive theological debate as she swept the church stairs or lit the candles for evening Mass or spoke in her pleasant, thoughtful way or smiled her kind, amused smile? The nun was insufferably passive, imperturbable even, as full of grace as the saints she prayed to. And all the while, he could hear the rhythm of her heart, could smell her sweat, could see when the color rose to her cheeks.

Gideon was not unaware of his own charm. He knew how boyish he could seem still, especially when his hair, kept longer on top, fell forward into his eyes. Despite the width of his shoulders, the strength of his body, and his height, he could play the gentleman instead of the predator easily enough. He could bow and kiss the backs of women’s hands and dazzle with his humor and intellect. His smile was wide too, with lips that were full, plump, bee-stung almost, nearly womanly; the whores in Blackhaven love him for his mouth (until it’s red with their blood). Even his eyes, bright in their blueness, can be playful if he wants them to be, if he minds his temper and shields his impatience.

Women of the cloth were not immune to him. Before Philomena, he had sampled a number of Ravenstone’s supposedly pious Sisters with little to no coercion required. They fell into his arms like lamb to the slaughter, but they often tasted hollow, as empty as their convictions. He’d wanted one that would provide a challenge, wanted one to test, to torment, to mold.

Perhaps he had simply played too long at kindness, and the creature inside of him grew tired of the charade, or maybe Philomena’s offering of barley bread had infuriated him for its simplicity: a gift it was, without preamble, without expectation, so humble but made with care, shaped by her own hands and effort. The bread had still been warm, wrapped in wax paper and kept in a tin, only she’d dropped it hadn’t she? Dropped it when he’d pushed into her space and startled her with his viciousness, with his snide comments. She’d nicked herself on broken glass in her hurry to pick up the loaf and avoid the threat of his body; he’d smelled the blood like a shark then, even though she’d bled such a small amount, and he’d had to fight to keep his fangs from protracting.

Had it been the barley bread that made him think of Laith? His anger had gotten the better of him because of it. No, certainly not the bread, but the biblical stories of their namesakes. Sycophants, like his younger brother, undoubtedly nursing at Hadassa’s breast even now, with his skeletal fingers clinging to her and his devotion as palpable as the stench of the city factories.

Gideon rubs his knuckles against his eyes, groaning. The night sky is damp with chill, but it’s black as pitch; he still has time before dawn.

Basque caws at him irritably, sensing his longing, and paces back and forth against the broken window of the abandoned row house. His claws click against the crumbling exposed brick, and Gideon scatters a handful of corn across the windowsill for him to pick at before ducking under the sagging doorway and out into the street. He takes the path through the cemetery, following the train tracks, until he can smell the rot of Linemell, and then he follows the sound of Ravenstone’s bells all the way to the cathedral.

The main doors are always open for those seeking the solace of prayer or some respite from the winter wind, and it’s such an easy thing to slip in with the darkness, to be unseen in the shadows, to make his steps as quiet as the grave. When he finds the kitchen, it’s cold, the fires from the stoves long since extinguished. The basket of bread for the needy is on the main butcher table, the loaves covered with a cotton towel embroidered with golden crosses, and beside it is Philomena’s tin, the wax paper torn from where it had fallen earlier onto the floor.

Gideon rips the paper away and presses the loaf to his face, inhaling.

He can smell the yeast and the baked flour, the salt, and the honey. There, too, on the top left is where he finds her blood. He holds the bread between his palms and breathes deeply—smells a freshness like strawberries, a tart acidity like white wine, and something rich, something almost feverish. With his eyes closed, he runs his tongue across the top of the bread, slow like a cat licking cream.

He gets a flash of her then. Just a brief imprint of her on the backs of his eyelids. Dressed in lace and pale blue, her hands skimming the tops of wildflowers and grass as she walks through a field, her hair the red of the evening sun.

It’s gone as quickly as it had appeared.

Gideon feels his anger like a torch inside of him, an impossible ache that scorches, and he digs his fingers into the loaf, splitting it. The right side crumbles between his palms. He steps on the crumbs, smearing the bread into the cracks of the old floor. Crouching in the dark of the kitchen now, half-hidden by the length of the butcher table, he bites into the remaining part of the loaf.

The bread is like desert sand in his mouth. He wants to reject it immediately, and the need to spit it out almost overwhelms him. How long has it been since he’s tasted human food? Nearly three hundred years?

He does not swallow, but he lets the bread sit on his tongue, until he can taste the blood soaked inside of it.

Without knowing it, he moans, the sound pitched-low in his belly.

He sees her again, the blood-walking almost instantaneous, sparking a burst of images in the darkness of his mind, a rapid-fire succession of photographs caught in the wind. Philomena as a child, her freckled face bright with laughter, Philomena kneeling to take the holy sacrament, Philomena’s mouth wind-chapped and hair tousled as she helps to build a fence in a village he does not recognize, Philomena’s hands skimming the pages of a book.

The memories are miniscule, and then they are gone. It infuriates him all over again. He slams his fist onto the counter, and the nearby glasses rattle from the force.

Gideon spits the bread from his mouth, and in the morning the cook will wonder about rats.

3rd warm-up! Except not really because the muse took me in an entirely new direction, but it is what it is.

Welcome, audience members, to an early Gideon and Hadassa scene! Let me remind all new-comers here that Gideon was the original simp before Laith, so, Mena, if you're watching, well, be prepared for a horse of a (somewhat) different color.

Laith, we all know you simp better. No contest.

---



“All I am is what you can’t let go.”
Elisabeth Hewer

“That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.”
Carl Phillips



Hadassa in Sindan, a copper-colored hood drawn up to hide the gleam of her eyes and the blood on her mouth, Hadassa blood-drunk and laughing from it, reeling the way the human men reel over their bourbon and gin. Hadassa as a child, her hair almost to her tiny hips, hair like a dark waterfall that spreads over a slaver’s calloused hands as he sears a scar into the tender flesh behind her left ear. Hadassa, older, long-legged and fierce-looking amongst a group of women in similarly-styled desert robes, her gaze defiant. Kalil then, his features indistinct but Gideon knows it’s him—he knows because Hadassa knows, because there’s something of the other man’s blood in him even now, and he’s cradling Hadassa’s face between his hands, smoothing her hair away from her high cheekbones, opening her mouth with his, but no, not this—Gideon pushes it away, lets the memories sift through him as sand through a sieve. Back to her childhood, to her mortal years, to the moments he knows so little of. He sees her, nearly ten, with an overly ripe blood orange between her hands, crouching in the dirt of an alley. He can smell it, its sweetness and warm acidity. Her fingers are sticky with the orange’s drippings, like her lips, and she’s greedy with hunger. She’s pushing the fleshy segments into her mouth, hardly chewing, but he’s losing the moment or it’s becoming another time, a new memory yet similar because he can sense her voracious, ravenous need, is almost struck in the stomach by the sheer force of her craving, and is she younger than before? Yes, a child still, but hardly school-aged, bare-foot and disheveled. Bruised on the neck, on her stickly arms, with a face smeared by dirt, and there’s a group of them, these child-urchins, clustered around a carcass, he thinks, yes, some mangled heap of bloody bits, a loathsome rotten corpse, thick with flies, but the children pick at it like carrion crows and —

“Not that,” she says, her voice steely and cutting through the fog of images abruptly.

Gideon groans. He’s frustrated. She doesn’t understand. He doesn’t care about it, the vileness of her mortal childhood, the shame she somehow still feels after so many centuries. There is not a thought of hers he could not curl himself around, not a memory he would not willingly share, not an image he could not recast in a softer light. He feels close to her like this, closer than any of the others can be, because this is his gift; this is what he seems to do better than any others, this reading of legacies, this traversing of blood-links to the past, and it’s the blood too, of course it’s the blood. Hers, rich and thick and powerful, spilling endlessly into his mouth from the tender flesh of the inside of her arm, and it’s him whose greedy now, whose licking feverishly at her skin, making a mess, who's pushing—pushing back into her veins, searching, feeling with his own invisible power amongst the wavelengths of her blood, until he has it, yes, Sindan again, that foreign place, a place of dark markets and deserts, and then there’s her hungry little girl’s face, her orphan’s face, her slave’s face —

“No,” she snarls, and he’s been thrown aside, ripped apart from her. He’s staggering, disoriented, crumpled on the cold floor of her bedroom, stupidly staring at the flickering flames from the many candelabra near the balcony doors. His face is stinging from the scrape of her nails even as it’s healing.

Hadassa is disappointed and tired and furious. She wipes the blood from her arm in one clean gesture, licks her fingertips afterwards, and says something Gideon can’t quite make out. There’s an ocean swelling between his ears.

“What?” he asks. The word comes out slurred, and he struggles slowly to his hands and knees. He feels both nauseous and, paradoxically, invigorated. He presses his palms into the cold marble flooring, trying to anchor himself back into this moment, this time and place.

She shakes her head.

When he grins up at her, his teeth are red from her blood, but he’s put his fangs away as a peace offering of sorts. He crawls forward, slowly, like approaching an animal who is threatening to flee, but Hadassa is no prey. She stands still, her mouth pulled into a thin line of displeasure, but he can tell how she hides her smile when he grabs the ends of her silken skirts, when he presses a kiss beseechingly to the fabric, when he ghosts his mouth across her fingertips like a gentleman.

“Apologies,” he murmurs, pushing himself to his knees and circling his arms around her waist. He burrows his face against her hip, kissing her there, turning his cheek to the flat of her stomach until she laughs, exasperated. “How may I atone?”

She untangles herself from him gently then but stoops so that they are face-to-face, eye-to-eye. One of her dusky hands brushes his cheek, pushes a messy blonde curl away from his eyes. He thinks she must be looking for something there, in the topography of his face, some lie or misgiving, a flaw he had not realized he wore so openly.

“You are not a man desiring expiation for sin. Don’t pretend otherwise, blood of my blood,” she says.

It is not what he was expecting. He sits back on his heels, scoffing some. “At least tell me what I did that was so terribly offensive.”

“You want too much, and you want too much too quickly. You do not respect boundaries, Gideon.” When he rolls his eyes, she snags him by the chin like a mother does a child, her nails sharp. “Kalil called it blood-walking, a rather romantic and misleading name for the way we can steal into a shared bloodline, and it is stealing, make no mistake. You may be able to see what another allows if the trust is there, if the donor is willing, but when you snake your way into gated paths, then you are treacherous. No better than the worm invading the rose garden.”

At this, he laughs, pulling free from her grasp. “A snake? A worm? What next, am I to be a spider?”

“Why not? Spiders are insubstantial creatures, easily crushed.”

“If you crush me, you will lose all your happiness.”

“If I lose Orson, I will lose all my happiness.”

He sneers at her then, but he wants to frown.

“You forget your place,” she tells him, not cruelly, as she rises to stand. “Like I said, you want too much too quickly.”

Gideon snatches a fist full of her skirts. “I want what you promised me.”

From below her, Hadassa’s expression is hard to read. Her face has become as smooth as polished gold. She tilts her head to the side in the softest of movements, like she’s curious or pitying. “Promises,” she says thoughtfully, “are also insubstantial.”

“Is that supposed to be profound?”

She’s annoyed again, he can tell by the way she yanks her dress from his fist, and the quick strides she takes to the balcony doors. She throws them open hastily, letting in the warm night air, but also the stink of the city.

Gideon gets to his feet. He wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve. After a moment, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Doubtful.”

“I am. I’m sorry. I’ve made a mess of the night, haven’t I? You can tell me it’s my typical behavior, I won’t deny it.”

She’s silent, her hands on the door frames, her eyes on the dark streets below. Truth be told, Gideon likes her annoyance, her irritation, her easy frustrations. He likes the way her eyes change from molten warmth to cold indifference. He likes her brutality, envies it even, and sometimes seeks it out. Her strength impresses him, almost as much as her capacity for violence.

“Let me take you out,” he offers. “I can find you a virgin.”

She laughs then, a short, surprised sound, but it’s enough to make him grin.

“Or an infant?”

More laughter, and he knows that she’s forgiven him when he folds his arms around her from behind and she leans back into the embrace. He nips at her ear, turns his face into the thick fall of her dark hair and breathes in her nighttime smell of lilacs and blackberries.

“What haven’t I given you?” she asks, and he hadn’t thought he’d hurt her earlier, hadn’t thought she’d cared.

“Nothing,” he lies.

Working my way through the warm-up prompts! 2 out of 3.

There is a 2012 (wow!) piece that references Ita approaching Chason with her plan. I like to think this happens before that, so it could be "canon" as their first official meeting/exchange of words.

--



“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.” – Pablo Neruda




She is cold cream, her lithe and elegant form a pale slice of delicacy amongst the stink and riot of the holding cells. She could not look more out of place in her flaxen silks and gossamer skirts—as insubstantial as air, the way the fabric seems to float around her, like spider-silk. Even in the sparse light between the cells, he can see the tight rope of pearls around her neck, their iridescent shine the luster of the affluent. He thinks there are tiny ones in her ears, too, and even some strung throughout her long hair—hair as pale as her skin, so blonde that it’s nearly white. A prized possession, Chason understands. One of the companion types, undoubtedly. The kind he’d heard of while running from the Vries’ men, the kind even drifter towns had rumors about.

The woman is barefoot. It’s a stupid choice. The floors here stink of antiseptic and harsh cleaning chemicals, but the gore is unavoidable all the same. The cell beside him holds a coyote so mangled that the poor creature can’t retain its human form; it’s panting, whining, with sickly froth at its mouth and the stink of death on its bloodied fur. The one behind him holds a woman with dull, medicated eyes and limp, greasy hair—she’s shuffling slowly, back and forth, over the 6 by 8 space, dragging her feet all the while, and she’s so dirty with a mix of her own feces and the grit of the fighting pit that he can hardly see the color of her skin beneath the filth. He’s been here almost three weeks himself. They haven’t hosed him down since his initial intake processing, so he knows he’s only adding to the grime of the place.

She makes her way slowly towards him, minding the shadows, and pausing to watch the rotation of the security cameras. He thinks she might be counting under her breath.

Chason sits on the metal bench in his cell, his elbows on his knees, waiting, curious. He can feel the sweat on the back of his neck and the grease in his hair when he pushes a hand through it. His jaw is thick with stubble, and for some reason he thinks of how it might scratch the woman’s skin if she’d only circle those clean arms around his neck.

She takes such small steps, such careful steps, walking mostly on the tips of her toes. It’s her feet he’s looking at when she comes to stop in front of his cell. He’s surprised her toes aren’t polished, but then neither are her fingernails, which he notices when her hands grasp the cell bars. No dirt there, not under those nails. Not like his own. No callouses either, from what he can guess. She must yield as softly as butter. Her bones must be thin.

When he lifts his eyes to her face, she’s watching him with frank nervousness. He laughs at her then, a harsh, rocks-in-a-tin-can sound, and he might as well have slapped her across one of her high cheekbones.

“What do you have to look nervous about, pet? You’re on the other side of the bars,” Chason says, the humor thick in his voice.

A flush of color hits her cheeks. It’s a pretty blush, not blotchy like some women’s, and he’s aware of the way it spreads down her long neck. “Why is that funny?” she asks, her pale brows drawing together, her fingers tightening on the cold bars.

“It isn’t,” he says, the laughter still there, threatening to spill between his teeth. “What’s a prize like you doing down here? What do you want?”

She has very blue eyes, and he thinks there must be some grit in her after all when she keeps his gaze, but he can smell the anxiety on her as easily as he can smell the perfume and oils. Somebody took care of this one. Somebody washed her hair and scented her baths and pampered her skin. He wouldn’t be surprised if that scent was between her thighs too, dabbed there by an attendant’s careful hand, and between her high breasts and across her sharp collarbones. Again, Chason realizes that she is so absurdly out of place that the laughter tears out of him, but it’s low and throaty and much like the sounds his animal could make.

“I’m Ita,” she says.

He pushes his hair out of his face again and leans forward more, his elbows sharp against his thighs. His hands dangle between his knees. He’s unimpressed by her admission.

When he doesn’t speak, she hurries onward, her words knocking into each other like stones. “I am … I belong to … Harrow Vries is my … I’m trying to say that-”

“Is this what he does then? Sends his pet down here to find another addition for the night’s enjoyments? I’ll bite. What’s that arrangement get us curs? A steak dinner? A hot shower? A night with the pet in a clean bed while the master watches? Go on, sing your tune.”

“It-it isn’t like that,” she says, her voice so soft that he has to strain to hear over the din of sounds around them. “You wouldn’t want a night with him even if it was.”

“Oh no?” Chason sneers, his face split by the sharpness of the expression. “It must be awful up there with your golden pillows.”

Again, she looks hurt, but he doesn’t know what this stranger expected. Something about her expression annoys him. He doesn’t have it in him to care about her feelings, not now, not when he’s still aching. He’s hurt—he’s been hurting, he can feel it on his insides, a sharp pain along his ribs that’s taking too long to stitch back together and heal. He’d fought once as part of the intaking process, a brutal and bloodthirsty and confusing initiation that had ended with his teeth tearing a shaggy wolf’s jugular. The savagery of it and the victorious, cackling whoops of his beast afterwards had earned him a red-tagged identification in his folder and on his cell. He sees it as a badge of courage, but that bravery has worn off now and he feels raw. Raw from the loss of his pack, from the containment within these iron bars, from the pain that permeates the air around him, from the cruelty of man. He can’t carry her pain alongside his, not when she’s so far removed from his brutal reality. So Chason lunges. It’s a sudden quick movement, the kind feral mongrels make, and Ita stumbles back even though he turns the lunge into an angry pace before he hits the bars. He’s sucked the air from her lungs all the same, and the fear only makes her body flush more. That gives him some satisfaction.

“You’re angry,” she says after she’s caught her breath, “and you’re strong. There’s a storm coming, and I need–” A sound to her right down the hall makes her stop, makes her turn her head. She’s as still as a statue then before flicking her eyes to the security camera. When she speaks again, her voice is even lower, a shiver of silk across stone. “I have to go. The patrol will be back soon.”

“Wait.”

She’s stepped back some, away from the cell, but she hesitates.

“A storm?”

“I can’t explain now. Tomorrow. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

It’s his turn to grab the bars now. He presses his face to them, peering at her.

“Wait,” he says again, and again she hesitates. “Why are you barefoot?”

The question makes her smile. It’s a shy and small turn of her lips, like her mouth is unfamiliar with forming the expression. “I am only permitted heels or nothing, and the heels make noise.”

When she turns to leave, he grabs her. His rough hand catches her wrist, and he pulls her back a step. He can feel her pulse jump, and he loosens his grip on instinct. “Chason. My name is Chason.”

“I know.” She smiles again, the same soft smile, and when she pulls free from his grasp it is not unkindly.

He watches her turn into a ghost then, her pale form disappearing amongst the darkness, silent except for the sounds of her dress. When he lifts his palm to his nose, he smells her there against his fingers—a woodsy, clean water scent that makes the animal inside of him keen.