Acton was likewise affected by the serenity of the day, the way the breeze set the petals of her flower-crown to trembling, stirred her white-blond hair against her cheek like a girl’s. It was unbalancing to stand here like this beneath full sunlight, no blood, no smoke, no swearwords. It made him feel like a fever-dream version of himself, a thing only heightened by how everything else had changed.
Who was this man, no Denoctian, no Crow, no copper in his mouth? Was he anyone?
When he was with her, he was. He could tell by the electricity in his blood when she looked at him with disdain, could tell by the spark in his skin and the way his heart turned over like an engine at each little cut of her words.
He watched her as she looked away, not trusting her long enough to turn his own gaze to anything else. Not wanting to, either. It settled on her scar light and brief as a dragonfly touch, and for the first time he wondered if he could make it vanish. If that was something she’d want.
Here was a truth uglier than her scar: he liked having marked her.
By the time she turned back to him, his gaze was elsewhere. It was on her throat when she swallowed – he did not miss the twin necklaces, thin lines of gold – and on her mouth when she spoke, and on her eyes when she almost laughed.
You’re special, she said, and he grinned, all teeth, and hated the way it made him feel as good, as alive, as a punch. “So my mother always told me,” he said, though his dam had died long before she’d said such a thing.
Idly he stretched his neck, glanced away, like the proximity of her didn’t make him feel like burning. Like she was anyone else. Until she spoke again, and her tail slapped against his leg, and he felt his smile stretch slow-slow-slow across his mouth.
Maybe this was what he’d been waiting for. Certainly his body seemed to think so: he could feel the muscles tense, readying for something. “Oh?” Acton flicked his gaze back to hers, those eyes bright sparks against the dark of his mask. His heart kicked into a higher gear, and he remembered exactly who he was, and he leaned nearer to her before he could think better of it. Once again they almost touched; her skin was only a shiver away.
“I’m not dumb enough to tell you for free,” he said, parroting her words to him from, oh, seasons and months and a hundred hazy nightmares ago. Back when the woodsmoke had been a darker sort of scent. It should be strange, maybe, that he remembered so well everything she’d said, down to the twist of her mouth when she said it. “Careful, Bex. You’re starting to sound jealous.” His grin felt as dangerous as a knife, and as much of a threat.
Acton pulled in a slow breath and let his gaze slide down the curve of her neck, the darker gold of the shadow of her throat. He paused when it reached the opal, small and glittering, a distant star. “This is new.” Would she, he wondered, let him linger near enough for his breath to stir the yellow hairs of her coat? To be this close and not touch was enough to make him dizzy. How like a sinner he felt, ready to atone only so he could sin again. “Planning on breaking another promise?”
There it was. The seconds that followed felt to him like the slow arc of a Molotov cocktail – nothing to do but wait for impact.
@
whatever you feed me I feed you right back
