some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
He is watching the flowers in her hair. The way the petals curl and sway in the breeze. The boy knows how each plant smells, he has seen each growing wild and free in the vastness of the woodland spaces. They are beautiful there, and though a part of him aches with their plucking, Leonidas sees how they look woven together, bright, beautiful, full of vitality.
He moves toward her, his golden, leonine eyes never leaving her poll. He weaves his way along the mown paths that curl through the tulip meadow. It is a meandering one, full of winding curves that lead him away and back again. Leonidas does not dare to stray from the path, and push through the flowers in a direct line. They are too beautiful to be crushed beneath errant feet. So instead he meanders slow as a stream toward the woman.
A smile curls her lips and in her basket flowers lie freshly plucked. His dark eyes lower to her gathered bouquet and then up to her feathers that flutter gently against her slim sides. The feral boy might have appeared more stallion than colt this night. When he speaks, he is lucky if his voice remains deep. It is uncomfortable, he thinks, straddling the line between adulthood and boyhood. Sometimes he is more man than boy. This night it is so. His muscles seem larger, leaner than even the night before. His baby fat lessened, the curve of his jaw, sharper, longer, not even the moon can soften the stallion lines of him.
But oh, the way he looks at her is all colt. Her beauty is a curious thing, it twinges in his breast, it steals the breath from his lungs and fills up with awkwardness, with shy awe. She wishes him a happy spring when she captures him within her gaze. She smiles and the curve of her lips, the delight of her voice steals the breath from a growing boy’s lungs. “And to you,” Oh how sullen he sounds, how strange his voice when it comes out so low and so self-conscious. He blinks his thick lashes that lie across his cheeks as he looks to his feet and thinks how green the grass is and how comforting it is to look there than at this woman and her beauty he has no words for.
@Solstice
