12-09-2015, 10:24 PM
He cannot help the way his gaze flicks endlessly over her, like a snake in the grass flicking the air with his tongue, searching out the heat of her.
Mandan feels a strange stirring in his heart that was not there before. He has no name for it because it is unlike the love his mother showed him, the love of a mare for her foal. This feels similar but oh so different! It makes him wonder how he can ever stop looking at the lovely shape of her head or the way her neck curves down into her back, she reminds him of the antelope on the plains with their light, leaping grace. Despite her grace and loveliness, he senses a vast reservoir of strength in her that binds him further to her.
He won't admit to it just yet - the fact that his heart is no longer his own. The taking of it had happened all too suddenly in such a subtle way that he was unaware of it's doing. She bewitched him, but he is cautionary in his heart’s keeping, afraid to let either it or his pride be gravely wounded by admitting that she owns the most sacred part of him. He almost sighs her name aloud, but hears the slightest hitch in her breath and his gaze flies swiftly to her face.
She is fine; dreamy, girlish, and vague and he is smitten by her charms - by the very voice that tumbles out of her in a clear soft river of speech. He can't hear anything around them save for her and he realizes that his whole world stands right there beside him close enough to touch but he swallows the hard lump of words that catch in his throat - he can't say them, not yet. She talks of the falls; his mother had been there briefly, if memory serves him right. Then asks him and his face fills with the light of a thousand campfires undimmed, his passions bright as his dark animalistic eyes find hers’.
“Here, in the meadow but we left soon after my birth for my mother's lands.” Mandan is back amongst the prairies bordered by the badlands; he has never seen another land go from soft grass to harsh canyon in a matter of miles, and the ancient eccentricities of that earth had seeped into his bones. “I came back,” and he knows that he doesn't have to say any more than that because she'll understand. He places his mouth against her neck boldly, his teeth scrape a trail down the cant of it until he breaks from her with a teasing nip on her shoulder. “I like it here,” and his thought trails off, he refuses to admit aloud that he likes it here all the more because she’s beside him.