[P] falling in love is hard on the knees

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends Acton had never been the kind of man who was good at handling worry. It wasn’t coded into him to be anxious; when it happened, when that black thick feeling crawled beneath his skin like tar, he tended to look for the nearest distraction. Best to get drunk (or pick fights, or blow shit up) until the feeling passed and the situation resolved itself. But this was not a normal worry. This was Raum, and Raum had teeth. For the first time in his cavalier life the magician was too worried to drink, too worried to eat. He wound through the masquerade the same way he would as a Crow, sticking to the shadows, watching all with his banked-fire eyes. Acton did not wear a mask, and the skin of his throat itched where Raum’s claw had caught him and begun to cut. All that to say, his feelings were complicated when his gaze finally caught the bright blue of Bexley’s. For once her grin did not make his heart jump like a souped-up engine below the hood, hungry for the starting line, but he tried to match it all the same, and at once shifted course to meet her. In the same movement he altered his gait, too - no more back-alley glide but the kind of swagger he was known for, like nothing in the world was wrong. Like he was already three sheets in and ready for more. In the space between seeing her and reaching her his heart tripped over and over itself, and his mind replayed every warning Raum had given him about Bexley and what he’d do to her. They had been nothing, they had been idle threats. But that was before. The music was swelling when they met, and he ghosted his lips across the bridge of her mask, still wearing that grin (like a mask of his own). “Goldilocks,” he said grandly, “you could stop a man’s heart, looking like that.” Any eyes on them had moved on, by now, and did not see (or thought nothing, if they did) when he reached just behind her mask, for the shell of her ear, and dropped his voice to a lover’s whisper. “We might have a problem.” @Bexley