He watches for so long that she thinks she must know what the twilight feels like when it slips low on the horizon beneath the weight of innumerable, watching eyes. But she doesn’t feel as grand as the colors of an evening sky, doesn’t feel admired. She shifts again, soft and unsure, her head ducking low, so low that her lips nearly touch the crest of a wave as it rolls past and urges her closer to him.
She obliges, but only for one step.
Two, but then she stops again.
She can’t take her eyes off him though, and even with her head bowed so low, those quiet teal eyes - not green enough to be emerald, not blue enough to be sapphire - continue to trace the lines of a face she is struggling to memorize before it is gone from her as all things are.
I don’t live anywhere. He tells her, interrupts her eyes, and she can feel the way her brow furrows beneath forelock, beneath bone. An invisible tell of the disappointment she can feel suddenly trickling cool beneath her skin. He is a wanderer like her brother, maybe. Wayward and untethered, free to give in to the impulses of wild knit firm beneath his skin. Hard to find, impossible to keep.
Not that she wanted to keep him, she thinks quickly, inhaling sharply as though she is scolding herself. She doesn’t even know this man with skin and stature like shaped quartz, with wings she feels certain must be so beautiful when they are not busy being pinned to his sides. She doesn’t need a friend - certainly doesn’t deserve one. That’s not what she meant at all!
She is still busy trying to soothe the wild in her thoughts, the heat flushing in her cheeks when he speaks again and she finds she is immediately distracted by the evenness of his low, stoic voice. By words that sound like a reprimand, words that don’t match the way he angles his head for her to come join him.
All at once, the fear returns. That desperate aching desire to be unseen, especially now by this man who has yet to flinch, yet to damn her for the unnatural strangeness stretched over every inch of chestnut skin glowing so softly. Is it possible he still doesn’t realize what he’s seeing? That, if she does move closer, she’ll have to watch him harden and recoil, watch the sturdy lines of an unfairly beautiful face twist and warp with disgust. She looks away from him, casts her eyes out to the waves, to the empty nothingness as though she might be looking for an escape. For an easier option.
But one word catches in her mind, one beautiful, important life-changing word.
Further.
You’ll irritate your skin further.
It must mean that he’s seen her. Seen the bones and the skin and the bleeding wounds for what they are. Must mean that he doesn’t mind? But she feels less certain of that, less certain that anyone would ever be able to look at her and not feel at least the slightest bit of horror or discomfort. To wear bones outside her skin, to have wounds that always bleed, it is not within the nature of most.
And she can hardly blame them.
But her face turns back to him and her eyes settle back into the lines and hollows of a head angled in her direction, and there is hope buried there in that pale, muted teal. Faint and fragile, tangled with a yearning ache she feels in the wretched depths of her beating chest.
“How would you even be able to tell?” She asks softly, shy amused light building in the summer shade of eyes that crease faintly at the corners as a crooked half-smile steals across her lips. She is close to him now, can’t even remember the moment she had started walking. There must only be five more strides until she would be close enough to reach out and touch her nose to his. But she doesn’t, only stops again, tilts her head and settles her gaze on his face with the flash of a shy smile. “I’m already inside out.”
It was meant to be a joke, meant to soften the stone of his features so that she might be able to catch a glimpse of a smile as rare as snow on this volcanic island. But as soon as she hears them aloud, the words sound strange and harsh and she winces, glancing away with a sharp, muffled exhale. “My name is Wonder.” It’s the only thing she can think to give him now, an apology for the crookedness of her humor as those worried eyes drift back to his.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love