I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved
I don't need to be saved
August is too much a man to guess what she truly is, that she is something wild and strange wearing the face of a mare. He could guess a thousand histories for her and never come close to the real thing.
It’s easy enough to pretend he might know her when her teeth whisper language across his skin that his body understands where his ears do not. It is not kind, that touch, or gentle - and yet he closes his eyes against it, arches his neck beneath it, half waits to feel blood bloom from her kisses and slide warm and rich as liquor down his golden skin. He has never minded a rough touch, remembers treating her in kind, and anticipates doing so again tonight.
So when she speaks, it takes him a moment to blink from the hazy stupor of heat between bodies and listen to her. And when he does listen - as much feeling her words as hearing them, each whispered word a ghost over his own lips - he studies her with a clarity hitherto unpossessed.
Her words sound a little mad, a little violent. Yet hadn’t he known both those things burned in her just watching her dance, and dancing (‘dancing’) with her? He couldn’t lean entirely on liquor and restlessness as an excuse to not guess that a wildfire might live beneath her burnished skin. What she says quickens his blood, bows his head. And when she breathes into his lungs, it tastes like ash and magic, like the air after lightning has struck, better than anything you could pour into a glass.
He wants to say I want those things too, but it would be a lie. August is no revolutionary, no god, no thing made for burning. He wants adventure, but only enough to make the comforts of home more comfortable.
When she pulls away, when she asks for the name of his ship, his smile is a touch distant, a hint sardonic. The ship he sailed, that simple merchant vessel, is not the one she wants. But he knows the one she does - he can picture it, ominous even at dock, indigo-sailed and stained gray as a storm. “Find the Charon,” he says, and puts his mouth to the pulse of her throat. “But find it tomorrow. Stay with me tonight.”
@Al'Zahra
