one good honest kiss, to feel alright
Almost she wants to shiver at the touch of Eik’s muzzle to her stomach. It is a soft touch, no violence, no pressure, and the feeling of it, even the idea, is so strange she almost does not understand what it’s like to know a touch like that. (How long has it been?) Even her meetings with Acton are fraught with teeth and bruises and little pricks of pain. This - this is something different. Something foreign.
She watches him. The way he seems so engrossed by the life inside her, like he is feeling something she cannot. Jealousy overtakes her, a pinprick knot in her chest, growing and growing and growing. Already she cannot help the feeling that this child is never really going to be hers in the same way that Bexley was never really her parent’s - this child, she thinks, is going to be kicking and screaming from the moment it’s born, and what else could Bexley expect from her own blood, and Acton’s?
Have you chosen a name for her?
Her. Hm. Bexley cannot pretend she does not have her own suspicions, and for Eik to confirm them seems like more of a blessing than an intrusion. She smiles, a wan, flickering thing, and says, Apolonia.
It came to her in a dream. A terrible dream - somewhere on the ocean where a church burned to the ground and left gold smoke in the sky - but a dream nonetheless, and she had woken up gasping at the kicks in her side.
She does not think it worth telling him, or perhaps some part of her already has.
She watches him. The way he seems so engrossed by the life inside her, like he is feeling something she cannot. Jealousy overtakes her, a pinprick knot in her chest, growing and growing and growing. Already she cannot help the feeling that this child is never really going to be hers in the same way that Bexley was never really her parent’s - this child, she thinks, is going to be kicking and screaming from the moment it’s born, and what else could Bexley expect from her own blood, and Acton’s?
Have you chosen a name for her?
Her. Hm. Bexley cannot pretend she does not have her own suspicions, and for Eik to confirm them seems like more of a blessing than an intrusion. She smiles, a wan, flickering thing, and says, Apolonia.
It came to her in a dream. A terrible dream - somewhere on the ocean where a church burned to the ground and left gold smoke in the sky - but a dream nonetheless, and she had woken up gasping at the kicks in her side.
She does not think it worth telling him, or perhaps some part of her already has.
