Something about her words – the way she says them or the meanings themselves, he is helpless at the moment to tell which – makes him dizzy, makes him breathless, makes him feel like he is staring up at a bright path of stars that look so near he might fall into them.
Oh, she makes him shiver when her lips ghost along his ear; she makes his breath catch in his throat like something snared.
I am no wild thing, he wants to tell her, but what is the gallop of his heart if not feral? What is the sudden sharpness of his senses, the dizzying pull, the startling want?
She draws away and their eyes meet, flint and tinder, and Asterion can find no words, no wry or soft thing to say that could hope to change the shift in the air. But perhaps it does not matter; he is naked before her, everything laid bare in the deep-dark of his gaze.
The sound that slips from her unbidden when his lips touch her throat - ah, it could bring him to his knees. It makes him feel reckless and he is not a reckless man.
And what do savages do, Asterion?
They take and they live and they never regret, they are never sorry for a moment –
But Asterion is sorry, when she says his name. The syllables, the shape of it, even the emotion there – it makes him think of Aislinn and it is like a punch to the gut. What is he doing here, with his mouth on her skin and the scent of her surrounding him? What is he doing with his heart that drums against his ribcage like a thing lawless and wanton?
He is terribly still beneath her touch. His eyes, so full of daring, fall closed, and his breath hitches and holds when she presses a kiss to his cheek. Her breath smells of sugar and flowers and the warm sweetness of horses. He does not dare move as her lips trace over him, designs as intricate and precious as any painted on his hide from the festival, and he only breathes again as she pulls away. It is no better with his eyes open; there is still the memory of her whisper in his ear.
“Moira,” he says, and his voice is a ragged thing, frothy waves whipped wild by the wind. Oh, traitorous heart! It is turning him to a fool once more. Asterion swallows, and reminds himself that they are at a party, that they are surrounded by a dozen horses, any of which he might know.
He reminds himself that she lives in the night court, and that in the night court lives too the source of his broken heart.
Music drifts in, and he remembers where they are – that there are flowers crowning them both, and laughter from distant groups, and that she deserves better than his sorry heart, which doesn’t even know what it wants. Asterion swallows, and smiles.
“They like dancing,” he says, as though it is anything other than a distraction, a chance to breath, to think, “after their desserts and before their dinner. Shall we?” And before she can make him stay, before he can betray himself any further, before he can remember her breath shaping words into the curl of his ear, he turns away.
And this more than anything makes him feel like a savage, careless thing.
@
if you'll be my star*
