05-30-2021, 05:09 PM
Ryatah
“You don’t know who or what I would have chosen, Ashhal,” comes her mildly exasperated response, and this time she does not mask her frustration as well as she had before. Sometimes she wonders if he is purposely impossible just to spite her, to ensure they never get any further than where they have already been. To keep them on this endless carousel that doesn’t stop but neither of them ever step off of.
She is bristling now with a rare kind of tension, not the kind that begs her to be ripped apart but the kind that makes her want to self-destruct. It simmers beneath a tranquil surface, only showing in the way her impossibly dark eyes flicker when they watch his face. Maybe this is what needs to be done—to push him until there is nothing left of them, of this, of anything that had been real or imaginary. He had said that only she had the power to break him, and maybe she wants to see what happens if she tries.
After all, she is always stronger, always more brilliant, every time she is broken and remade.
“You have pointed out several times the men I chose to spend my time with. The ones that make it easy to walk away,” she recalls his words from Nerine, trying to not flinch at the way they feel like a fresh blade on her tongue to have to say them again—to have to remember him saying them to her, an insult that has stuck with her through the years. “You were just like them, just like all the rest. Until—” her words stick in her throat, her breath trembling in her lungs as she tries to steady herself, apologetic and relentless all at once. “—until someone actually made it impossible for me to walk away.” Until Atrox chose her, and let her choose him.
Until finally she was not just someone’s entertainment for the night or the day or the month.
“There is nothing that says it wouldn’t have been you if you had only given me the chance,” she continues, quieter now, turning her nearly black eyes away from him. “You don’t have any idea how I might have loved you at the time because you were so busy making sure I never could.” When her eyes return to his face there is a smile, small and melancholy, though she expects her own softness to be met with his cold anger. “I suppose any kind of happiness for you and I was not meant to be real, then.”
She is bristling now with a rare kind of tension, not the kind that begs her to be ripped apart but the kind that makes her want to self-destruct. It simmers beneath a tranquil surface, only showing in the way her impossibly dark eyes flicker when they watch his face. Maybe this is what needs to be done—to push him until there is nothing left of them, of this, of anything that had been real or imaginary. He had said that only she had the power to break him, and maybe she wants to see what happens if she tries.
After all, she is always stronger, always more brilliant, every time she is broken and remade.
“You have pointed out several times the men I chose to spend my time with. The ones that make it easy to walk away,” she recalls his words from Nerine, trying to not flinch at the way they feel like a fresh blade on her tongue to have to say them again—to have to remember him saying them to her, an insult that has stuck with her through the years. “You were just like them, just like all the rest. Until—” her words stick in her throat, her breath trembling in her lungs as she tries to steady herself, apologetic and relentless all at once. “—until someone actually made it impossible for me to walk away.” Until Atrox chose her, and let her choose him.
Until finally she was not just someone’s entertainment for the night or the day or the month.
“There is nothing that says it wouldn’t have been you if you had only given me the chance,” she continues, quieter now, turning her nearly black eyes away from him. “You don’t have any idea how I might have loved you at the time because you were so busy making sure I never could.” When her eyes return to his face there is a smile, small and melancholy, though she expects her own softness to be met with his cold anger. “I suppose any kind of happiness for you and I was not meant to be real, then.”
EVEN ANGELS HAVE THEIR WICKED SCHEMES
@[Ashhal]