Something is rising in me: heat, darkness, a weightlessness sort of like helium tingling out from my chest, into my throat, down my legs like (I hate to say it) an electric current.
It is excitement. I think. It is thrill mixed with satisfaction: I am half-waiting and half-sated, pleased by the way he stares at me but wanting more. I always want more. I have never learned how to be satisfied with anything less than all, everything, entire. But I don’t think that’s a fault. It makes me persistent; it gives me purpose, beyond the next lavish feast, beyond the next piece of jewelry. Fine. Perhaps I can be tenacious, perhaps some people find it irritating, but I know nothing else.
It is in my blood. The royal curse. I was born wanting for nothing, and I will die the same way. And I plan on living the same way all the time in between.
He is watching me. Intently. A little shiver of pleasure rides up my spine, I feel indulgently smug. Lotus-eating is what my sister would call me. But life is hard enough: why not enjoy the little pleasures while they last, lean into hedonism—sink your teeth into the soft, warm thing while it’s still brave enough to stand near you, bask in the satisfying weight of Andras’ stare like a sunbathing cat?
A sound like a purr builds in my throat but doesn’t escape. I am warm all over, warm to the bones. Sweet? the stranger says. His eyes are on me, and they aren’t moving—hot and dark and heavy, boring holes, never flinching but only half-focused. As if he is looking not at me, but through me. Or perhaps it is both. But then he laughs.
Laughs.
And it is tense and rough around the edges, strained as if he does not know how to laugh at all, but I am still pleased: I flash a grin at him, instantaneous, amused. “I would never call you sweet. Handsome, though, I might.” And my eyes are growing dark, I think, as my gaze narrows; he stiffened when I stepped forward but did not, so I do it again, moving up another half-pace.
I want to touch him. Badly.
I think about it—what I might make him feel with just a brush of my nose against his ear, a sliding of shoulder to shoulder—
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