His gaze unfurls like petals opening on flowers. (She so does love when flowers blossom.) And she is immediately taken with him, something not even Aeneas can claim to have accomplished. Elliana slow to trust, and slower to let into her soul. The biggest difference between her and her mother. Elli falls in love with paintings, not people. But she admires the dirt of him, like there is a layer of wild and wilderness ingrained in him that she so aches to have for herself one day. There is a look burrowed into his eyes that speaks of wanderings and explorations and she wants to bury herself in the ebony of his hair to see if she can smell the wanderlust that she has only dreamed about.
“Hi,” she says with not the softness of sunlight like her mother, but the ease of snowflakes against a blade of grass. She is almost breathless. Almost. She is not so in amazed by the living as her mother when the dead whisper to her of beauty she cannot even imagine. “Thank you,” she says, plucking it for herself, but thinking it is for them, it is their flower. She will put it in water when she goes home, and think of the wild boy. She will admire the red of it in the warm glow of their home and think of the wild boy. She will watch it wilt and die until all the petals have fallen, and still she will think of the wild boy.
Then she will forget.
Till she remembers again.
Tilting her head back, she considers the wide expanse of sky that blankets the pair of them. How much of the sky has he seen? She wonders inside her head. “How much of the sky have you seen?” She wonders aloud. “Could you plant flowers in the clouds? And grow trees in storms? Are rainbows made of fall leaves?” And she asks maybe because he feels like a man tonight, and maybe he can answer her. But she asks too because he sounds like a boy, and maybe he feels just as curious she does. And she likes to think this wild boy must know about the sky and the clouds and just how feral it is.
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