overdosed on confidence
He looks small from here (although—isn’t he always?)
I glance down at him. He is a blemish on my city, a black mark on the golden cobblestone. A blue arc of electricity blooms into existence, forking, rising, spilling over his dark skin and rattling, shaking, as if something is about to explode forth: it lets out a dry hiss, a kind of crackling like bones breaking or reforming or just shifting around, and for a brief moment I am stunned into silence by the way the cyan light plays over his skin like sunlight on water, like red on roses. The sound of it like glass breaking.
I chew the inside of my cheek and taste salt, iron, wanting.
His whole body burns with light. All the sharp edges of it catch sunlight and reflect it back; the slanted rise of his narrow shoulders, the thin, metallic curve of his glasses, the jut of a knifish hip. Why is he so cutting? When I look at him I am a little afraid, not of what he could do to me but what I could do to him—cut or break or shatter, with a little more than a kiss. Something nervous rises and takes flight in my chest, beats its wings up into my throat. (And whose wings are those?)
A sharp, brief pain. One of the snakes has nipped impatiently at my ear, which flickers wildly in indignance and incites the noise of a little squeak that I am glad my guest cannot hear (maybe gladder than I’ve ever been of anything in my entire life). But I know the game. I know they are as impatient as I am, just a little quieter about it. I know what it means to feel that little bite. And maybe I’m a little irked that someone so small can boss me around, but when he says his name—
Andras, not Warden—when I hear his voice, the little strain of it, the half-beg (I would like to think it is a beg) to let him in—
Of course I do it.
With a short huff I turn back into the house and prance down the winding staircase, out of the front door; into the courtyard, which is still quite active with the movement of gardeners and servants boiling honey tea; then through the lawn, deep yellow-green with a crown of bluebells and ropes of brittlebush, to the wrought-iron gate that I push open without much fanfare and let swing toward him.
I don’t even really thing about it—the repercussions, what I might give up by letting him in. It doesn’t seem to matter. He is already here, all the way from Delumine. We are already face to face. Without the lace of the fence between us, I am once again distracted by the almost-blue of his eyes, the soft downturn of his mouth, the way he still smells like the forest even after leaving it so far behind—the flash of white on his lip, the matching slash folded into his wing.
“Or what?” I challenge, half-smiling; the voice and the expression feel good, almost too natural. My stomach turns.
I hate this and I love it.
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