one good honest kiss, to feel alright
Bexley knows well enough that anything you worship will eat you alive. (She has done the same more than once to her own denizens.) Which is why she tries not to use the word worship for Acton, but deep down, grinding its hard teeth against her heart, she knows there is nothing else to describe it properly - the blood sacrifices she’s laid to his altar, the gold and the figs and the lives she would give him, if he asked - the way she wears his name on her face day after day after day.
She is getting too old to pretend there is something special about the way they love each other. It is as special as any other kind of sacrifice Novus has made, which is to say not very. After a certain amount of bodies pile up, she thinks, blood is more a side effect than an offering.
But it is summer and the sun shines overhead and her skin burns with a mixture of giddiness and greed and magic, and as she watches him with a fervent look she is convinced, purely, surely, that nothing else will ever make as much sense to her as the curve of his jaw, and the amber of his eyes; drunk on the season and a need for the world to make sense, a part of her, crazed, rabid, kamikaze, is still successful in saying she loves him.
Sure, Bexley answers his to his invitation, and her voice is instantaneously solid again. She bites a smile into his shoulder. Maybe he can feel her eyelashes fluttering against his skin; maybe it doesn’t matter. As long as you buy me something nice to wear there. It’d be terrible if I made a bad impression. It’s mostly a joke. But still some part of her, that stupid part that wants to call it love, is insistent on being good enough for him.
She is glad, then, that he cannot read her well (or at all). Who knows what disasters might unfold if he could?
She’s distracted easily, instantly, by the graze of his teeth across her neck and the way his breath spirals over her skin, how it sends a shudder all the way down her spine - after this long it seems stupid that she wouldn’t be used to his touch, the way he knows how to find every nerve under her skin; but it hits her like an epiphany every time, breath-taking and impossible to escape. Always, she answers, and her voice has dropped an octave, and her eyes have gone a little dark -
But she’s almost sure that’s what he wanted, anyway.
