BEXLEY BRIAR
I look at you and it is like drinking cold water.
I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.
I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.
In her stomach, a faint rumble, close to hunger but not quite. It shakes her to the bones. It is a tight, familiar grip. In the dark corners of the market, Bexley watches with her lashes low, her mouth twisted, and she wears the velvet-dark expression of someone puppeted by her desires.
It is common for her, this kind of look. Watchful. Somewhat satisfied, but never fully. When the girl chooses to take a break—stepping down from her little podium to take a swig from a bottle of wine offered by a man much less enticing than Bexley—the golden girl feels something like jealousy but not quite turn over in her chest. A key in the ignition.
Maybe it’s the smoke. Maybe it’s the darkness; maybe it’s the alcohol. But Bexley’s nerves are simmering under her skin like a just-contained wildfire, and she ratchets ever-hotter as that strange, spectral blue gaze meets her eyes, clear and spectral as a snowstorm even across the crowd that separates them.
Bexley tilts her head, and she smiles a dark, drawling smile.
The smell of jasmine swirls in her nostrils, thick as any bottled perfume, and it only grows stronger as the dancer sidles toward her. Her coat shifts in the faint light like a jewel Bexley has never seen. When she pauses, the distance between them closed almost completely, Solterra’s ex-regent does not make the slightest attempt to contain her staring as she looks over the fine lines, the pale lashes, the doe eye, the starry dapples.
They match each other, in the way of all beautiful, unholy things.
“Bexley.” She takes a sip of wine. “But feel free to keep calling me golden one, if you want.” I wouldn’t complain is what comes through in the sly curve of her smirk, in the lowering of her lashes.
