pilate
/
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
My heart stops when he opens the door; a sharp sting runs straight through me horizontally, and in places where my skin feels like it’s stretched too tight, silk over bone, I can feel my blood run cold.
He looks ridiculous. I want to be dismissive of him and I think I almost am. From this close I can see the way his eyes widen incrementally in surprise, how his mouth twitches in something that is not exactly a smile when I glance at that snow-white lip: my chest hurts, I want to kiss it so badly.
But I am silent. My dark mouth remains in only a half-cocked smirk. My eyes are molten when they meet his, but not in a way that implies any kind of warmth. I roll my shoulders back and feel a slow, comfortable heat ooze down my spine, unwinding like an eight day clock and falling apart at the seams until every muscle feels like it’s turning to liquid. The door opens with a gentle whuf. Warm air sweeps out from the room; over the warden’s shoulder, I can see the kind clutter so inherent to the homes of those without noble blood—stacks of papers, books with cracked spines, an oil lamp with a warped yellow glow.
It looks nothing like my room at home, and exactly like what I expected of him. Darkness sweeping in from the corners, the smell of pine needles and petrichor, the glow of his eyes like moonstone shining out from a black face and a black room. I try to measure my breath. But it hurts to hold an inhale, it hurts to do anything but look and look and look at him until my head starts ringing like a bell and fills with soft, cottony darkness, thicker than the sound of humming.
His voice cuts through: After you. I blow out a short huff of breath, and I can see it stir the fine whorl of hairs on his forehead, ruffled like wind on the sea. But I don’t argue. I don’t say anything at all. I just dip my head in a half-second gesture of surrender and brush past him, into this room that smells like wilderness and feels like sunlight, and I can’t tell if the flicker of electricity that runs across my side is Andras’ fault or mine, if my body is finally betraying me.
Either way it makes me shudder all the way down. Either way it makes my stomach churn. I turn in the middle of the room to face him; my ear is filled with the soft hissing of the snakes, agitated out of their usual sleepiness by the way I’m suddenly tenses with adrenaline. One nips the soft spot between my cheek and my neck. I flinch, and an ear flicks despite my attempts to keep still. Everyone in this room has teeth for me.
“Everything?” I repeat. My voice is strained by a derisive kind of sweetness, like I’m talking down to him but in a way I know he’ll like. I meet his gaze and narrow my eyes.
I want to hear him say it. Everything he’s done wrong. Everything he wants from me.
