bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze
if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
She is all fire, even if she doesn’t see it. Her eyes instantly go sharp and defiant and he scowls deeper, lip pulling further into a frown. He searches through her eyes, her every thought pressing into the back of his mind infuriating him even more. But it wasn’t until she feels fear—of him—that he reacts at all. He drops his fingers from her face like he is burned, green eyes widening slightly and a pure revulsion twisting its way around his stomach. The thought of hurting her, of being compared to someone who would, stabs at him repeatedly and he clenches his jaw to distract himself from the pain of it.
“I would never force you to do anything,” his voice is quiet and steely, each word carefully measured. He shoves his hands into his jean pockets, face impassive and muscles tense as they rope down his arms. He wants to say more—to react to how deeply the thought has wounded him—but he bites it back, unwilling to make her apologize for her reactions after all she’s been through. It’s not about him, he thinks bitterly, and he refuses to make her wrong for it. Refuses to turn this so that he is somehow the victim.
Instead he just watches her, watches as she works through her own thoughts and doubts. He almost laughs at the idea of him having an arsenal of women, as if things like this usually interested him at all. His experience in this field was painfully limited, mostly by his apathy to the subject. It was comical to think otherwise. To think that something would drag him out of the office, out of his books, on a regular basis.
Before her, at least, it was comical.
“Is that what you would be doing with me?” His voice is equally as sharp as hers. “Settling?” A low snarl escapes him as he twists his head to the side, frustrated and confused and desperately wishing he still had some sort of target with which to direct the energy. He finally pulls his hands from his pockets, the jeans having left deep imprints on the top of them, and drags them through his hair. “I don’t know what else you want from me, Wallace. What else you need to see.” He inhales, cold air stinging his lungs and then he rubs a rough palm over his face. When he withdraws it, there is a deep slice running down his cheek.
“So here—have everything.”
This time he doesn’t take her palm to do it. Instead, he pulls everything from deep within his belly and then sends it spiraling outward, throwing it up in front of her but not forcing her to experience it. It manifests as a blue, pulsing ball, the light illuminating the sharp angles of his face, the blood that drips down to his stubbled jaw. He doesn’t say anything, just watches the light as it ripples and flickers in front of him. “You want to know everything there is to know about me? It’s all right there for you.”
All she had to do was touch it to have free access—to everything that made him up. To his impossible birth, to his eternal bond to his twin sister, to a life spent researching and learning and studying. She would be able to feel his own confusion after the last time they met, the echoes it had left within him, and the sharp pang he had felt when he had first seen her tonight. To the desire that curled within him, for perhaps the first time in his life, to his blood-curdling fury when he saw the bastard who had bothered to lay a hand on her to his frustration at her and then to, perhaps the most dangerous of all, that impossible something else blossoming in his veins. His first experience with the need for something more.
All laid bare before her. All she had to do was take it.
woolf
I am loathed to say it's the devil's taste
