She is so stunned when he closes the distance between them again that, with a thumping, aching heart, she nearly steals a few more steps back. But there is something in his face that stills her, something that calls to the softness in her heart and makes her merely freeze with those seafoam eyes gentle against his face. He doesn’t stop until they are nearly chest to chest and she is sure he must be able to feel the way her heart throbs and races even at this distance.
She is stunned again when he reaches for her, presses the soft heat of his lips to the lines of her worried face and eases them upward to the curve of an ear flicked backward to listen to him. I know I’m not wrong. And she cannot help the way she lifts her face to him, the way she pushes subtly closer until that delicate little chest is pressed to his so that her heart can match the rhythm of him. She would close her eyes and savor this strange, unexpected closeness, but there is still the fear that if she does he’ll be gone when she opens them again, just the painful product of a fever-dream.
So her eyes stay locked on his face and the way he doesn’t try to pull away from her, the way he doesn’t recoil from her wrong and her ruin and the sticky way she bleeds color into the grey of his dappled skin.
He touches her until it is all she knows, until she is buried beneath her confusion and suffocating happily beneath this weight of him. She can feel every gentle pattern he traces along skin both ragged and smooth, every stroke he makes across the welts of bone that sit like strange continents against the red oceans of her body.
She likes it best when he soothes the ragged places, when the soft and warmth of his tongue wipes them clean and coax little sounds from the back of her aching throat that would be better kept buried. But he is teaching her about pleasure in places that have only ever hurt, showing her good when there has only ever been bad - and when her eyes do finally slip from his face, it is only because they are suddenly too heavy-lidded to keep open while he touches her in this quiet way.
I can show you something, to make you understand why I don’t think you’re terrible, he says, low and rough, and she blinks because she has forgotten again, because she is so easily lost to this thing that feels like kindness pressed against her skin, but you have to trust me.
She thinks she must or else she wouldn’t still be pressed into him like this, must trust him even if some part of a very broken heart still wonders how any of this can be real. But she doesn’t shift immediately to meet his eyes again, because her lips have found the joint of his wing where it erupts from his shoulder, and she is busy nosing through the soft down of stormy feathers that smell so much like him. It is a good smell, like deep forests and secret places, like sleeping sunshine and cedar.
“I trust you, Nightlock.” She whispers after a beat, those soft words stirring in the down of his feathers until she leans back to look up at him. But the words feel like a vow more than they feel like the truth, because it would be so much easier to doubt him. To doubt this kindness and the way he holds her close, the way his lips have been so busy memorizing the soft and hard contrast of her delicate red body. But when she finds his eyes again, there are no beasts laying in the dark of them, no wild but the same that’s settled in her eyes too.
No reason not to trust him.
She reaches up to touch his face with her lips, to taste the salt that’s settled there from the ocean spray and the dusty sunshine laying in beautiful contrast over strong, hard angles as the sun sinks low on the horizon. She is more careful of her antlers now as her lips sink lower over his face until they are settled at the corner of his mouth and against skin that is so impossibly soft on a man so impossibly not. This closeness makes her heart ache inside her chest, makes it pound and race ragged until she is sure he must be able to hear it, sure she will feel the corners of his mouth twitch with a knowing smile. But she doesn’t move away, only sinks closer again so his mouth rests against her cheek and she can close those soft ocean eyes to ask, “Do you trust me?”
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love