pilate
/
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
Andras looks like he’s about to die.
Maybe I should be worried, but I’m not. I’m… satisfied. I look at him, at the nervously trembling line of his mouth, at the pupils blown wide in his gray gaze, how his expression is so earnest it almost looks like pain, and I think of that phrase I’ve heard so many times before: I like a look of agony because I know it’s true.
This must be true. The way he looks at me like I’m going to kill him—I think I might be the world’s best actor, and even I couldn’t fake that expression so convincingly.
Up close, I observe every inch of him. Sometimes I forget that he’s smaller than me; his wings and the halo of blue electricity that surrounds him, and perhaps in part his rage, always make him seem my size or bigger. But I see it now. I feel the few inches of height between us like I’d feel a mortal wound: when I look at him, I realize, I am looking down.
I don’t do that often. At least not in a literal sense. His eyes are the color of the sea in a storm, or the sky above it—or the blurred line between one and the other, a smudgy, foggy, smoky gray glossed over by a faint haze of pale blue. His lashes are dark and curled up thick. And the sharp black planes of his face are as deep and haunting as the Solterran night, with no stars but the crescent moon of the white on his lip, breaking up the dark.
He is beautiful, and I hate him more than I can say.
The switch flips. I don’t know what causes it. But I feel bitter and suddenly, physically sickened by the warm, soft, repulsively tender touch of the Warden’s mouth to my cheek, my jaw, my neck. It should make me melt; instead I stiffen. It should make me swoon; instead I have to stop myself from cringing sorely.
He doesn’t know me, I think. He wouldn’t touch me if he knew me.
So when he asks if I want to know, I say without stopping to think, my voice low and unusually serious: “From you, I don’t think I could handle more. Plus I’m not sure I’d believe them.”
The switch flips. I don’t know what causes it.
But I’m horrified, and I leave without even a smirk.
