one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Adna wonders if maybe she has some of the blame to bear.
After all, she had been growing her daughter in the pit of a belly of hate and fear and confusion. She had been growing her daughter even when she spit venom at Beth as Gospel does now. She had been growing her when they had clashed, when she had been by herself, when she wanted to rage at the heavens for bringing someone like in her life just to rip him out of it. Just to make her mourn the absence of it.
But she can’t think on it now.
She can’t think on it too long.
Instead she lets it roll off her scaled shoulders like it doesn’t sink into her flesh. Like she is not affected by the fear that it instills in her. She just feels the flutter in her belly when she catches the curve of his lips and savors that sweet smile that he gives so rarely. She feels a shiver race up her when he promises to be here and she fights the tears that prick at her eyes because she so desperately wants to believe it.
Stay, she wants to whisper.
I’ll cherish however long you can give me, she wants to promise.
I’ll understand when you need to leave, she wants to lie.
But they all die in her throat and she can only tell him these things with the way she kisses his jaw, the way her fangs skim against his flesh and she presses lips and tongue instead—soft and gentle and nothing of the violence that simmers in her veins. She pauses at his question, breathes him in.
“She doesn’t hate you,” she says, and she believes it. “It’s…difficult to be born like this.” She had not experienced it so early on, but she knows what it is like to feel your nature rise up in the center of you. the way you have to fight or yield to it. “You hunger and rage and feel things differently.”
She wishes she could explain it more eloquently to him—could have him feel the way it means.
“She will learn how to control it and not be controlled by it.”
Another kiss because she finds that she cannot go long without touching him.
“She will not hate you, Beth.”