How pretty she is. Bexley had forgotten it—forgotten the magnitude of it, at least. Florentine’s face, over time, had lost its focus in her mind. (All memories do.) What used to be a clear picture had become smoggy and unfocused, a picture in a frame of smoky glass. There were moments Bexley feared that she would never remember more than snapshots here and there: the one soft-toffee curl; the deep purple of her eyes, bruised like violets; one corner of her mouth turned into a cunning smile.
Looking at her, Bexley wonders how she could have ever forgotten this girl, even the most minute detail. It seems criminal. How could anyone ever look away? She is like something out of a storybook: baptized by flowers, painted in gold.
Bexley stares at her with a heavy blue gaze. There is something inordinately serious about her eyes as they meet Florentine’s, despite the clever smile on her lips: they burn with blue flame, like the base of a shrine-fire. They are quite clearly leaning toward truth—the confession of something she has not said for years, the desire to come clean with something rabid.
The weight of it builds in her; it crescendos. Bexley feels the words pulling at the corners of her mouth and cutting them open like salt—the same Glasgow smile she wore that one night in the markets, aching all the way into her cheeks. But she says nothing. And the silence between them sits in her chest like a rock.
Florentine teases her with a dark, satin grin; some of the tension slips from Bexley’s body. “Ha, ha,” the golden girl taunts, her voice as warm as it is sarcastic. She raises her head, looking down at Florentine through a thicket of reddish lashes, with her mouth twisted into a cocky smile, and says: “Truth.”
But there is a dare in the sound of it—smooth as velvet, darker than wine—and when Bexley grins, gold glints from in between her teeth.
