one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She sees the blood on her daughter’s chin and knowing that she is already learning the taste of copper, the metallic bite of how your own gifts can turn against you, causes her heart to swell in her chest. She bites back her own grief and reaches down to clean her daughter’s chin. It is instinctual and she doesn’t mind the blood on her tongue although she hates that it is her daughter’s. Hates that she has to learn this so young.
“You will learn to deal with it,” she says softly after she has cleaned up the blood. “Soon you will forget that they are there and you won’t bite your tongue every time you talk.”
She glances up, almost apologetic, to Beth as she says these words.
How he must hate that she has cursed their daughter with such things.
How he must hate that his daughter has to learn how to talk around her fangs.
She blushes underneath his compliment, her lashes sweeping down. She knows that she is not perfect. He certainly knows it more. He has felt the way her rage kindles so quickly that she can barely keep up with it. He has felt how she can cry and grow furious in the same breath. How it so quickly spirals our of her control that she forgets what it means to be logical.
But she doesn’t ask him to retract the words.
Would never ask him to take them away.
Instead she just inhales. “Good. I’m glad.” It feels so weak when she wants to tell him how deeply she has hoped that he would stay, even for a while. How terribly she wants to find the curve of him and press into it. How she wants to relearn the shape of him.
But their daughter snags her attention and her gaze sharpens slightly when she makes out the words being whispered into her. “Gospel,” the word is a warning, a bullet. A quick and fast whip of the tongue as she leans down. “We don’t talk like that,” she warns, but follows it up with a kiss to her neck, hoping that her father didn’t hear what she had to say.