Oh, he wants to quail at the feeling of her lips on his throat, hot breath and the scent of flowers and blood. But Lysander does not tremble, only tilts his chin away to open another soft centimeter to her tender mouth.
If she were not so caught up by the beat of his heart (quickening like a hawk’s with her so close) she might notice the way his dark clean limbs are taut and still. His lashes brush his cheeks when he closes them, and the sigh that slips between his teeth then sounds almost pained, though his own injuries are long forgotten.
But then he laughs, a low rumble like roots pleased to find rich earth as they reach down into the darkness. “It depends on the circumstances,” he says, and he is almost sorry for the way he can never give her a straight answer for anything.
The sound of thunder echoes his laughter, and perhaps Novus is laughing at the two of them, for it knows what is to come as such fragile mortals talk of gods.
Foolish, indeed.
And ah, his heart thrills to hear her voice slide over the syllables of his name, to hear it next to wicked. Her laugh makes him remember what it was to have ichor and not blood – rich and hot as molten gold.
There is a part of him (one he pushes away, buries deep within the tangled thorns and shadows of trees) that wonders how it is they are closer than they have been, nearer to some edge neither will name, when he is as good as a stranger to her. What does it say about the both of them?
“To bore you is the greatest sin I can think of,” he says – though the warning she anticipates presses up against his teeth. You should not talk so boldly to strangers – don’t you listen to fairy tales? Lysander cannot bring himself to speak it; he is selfish, greedy for her touch, for her laugh.
And nonetheless she pulls away, and Lysander feels the tension and the heat slip from him like shedding his shadow – until her next words catch him and hold him fast.
Do you promise?
Oh, Anthousai – he has never promised anything in his long and strange existence. To promise was to make a thing permanent and to be permanent was to wither. Lysander is no stranger to offerings but this, oh, this –
Even the playful tone of her voice does not bleed the stillness from his limbs, the dark gleam of his eyes. She has given him a gift, the room to make light of this moment, and perhaps she would forget this conversation the way she’s forgotten all but the shape of him like an indent in silk sheets.
“I promise,” he says, and his gaze holds hers like twisting vines. But his smile is swift on the heels of his words, too little room for the weight of them to echo. “Only if you lie down and rest. I must go, Florentine, but I will not be far.” How strange it is, to feel his heartbeat so unsteady – and before his body can betray the strange nerves that have swallowed him, he presses a kiss to the tender skin above her eye and slips from the room like night receding.
when I first saw you
the end was soon
@
