leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped
What a dream it is to hear her say it and he wonders what it feels like in her mouth. If the edges are soft or barbed. If she likes the weight of his name or if she finds it troubling. And he almost asks, so keen to know what happens in her mind that he very nearly blurts it out. But he swallows it down, buries it deep. She will share it, if she wants him to know.
He is learning to be patient, Isakov. And he is learning other things, too.
Her smile glimmers so brightly that it puts a hollow ache in his chest before it is gone, chased away by his thoughtless question. How mournful he is to see it go. But he listens and he tries to understand. He thinks of his mother and the glass stallion who was not his father and their glass daughters. How dreamy the girls were, how they were quiet but not in the way she describes.
He has smelled sadness on his mother and the glass stallion but he has never thought much about it. He has never considered it a thing worth contemplating and he feels some twinge of guilt now. To think that he should have paid more attention.
His brow darkens in a frown but he nods. How he wants to pull her into a warm embrace and assure her that she need not ever think to be quiet in his presence. Alas, he refrains from this, too. “It makes sense,” he assures her, edging closer like he might curl himself around her after all. But he merely touches her shoulder a little more urgently. Not the breath of touch it had been when he’d first reached for her.
“No, my family is not like that,” he admits, “though it’s not without its own problems.” He tries for a smile then, pressing his gilded tongue against his teeth. “You needn’t keep quiet around me,” he murmurs into her shoulder.
@[Avelina]