06-15-2017, 11:01 PM
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
A wind rises up off the waves and blows both a scent and sea spray into his face.
“I could,” he admits, knowing that he had been lonely too long but not sure how much of a companion he could be to her. Nothing had ever been the same since Spark’s change and the hills became something else, something other than he thought them to be and everything else became just a memory. “But I may not be the best company…” he warns her, not sure why it was necessary to say that but something in him found himself too drawn to the way she seemed to come out of rock and tide like a thing imagined, lank-kneed but almost, almost like… no, he tells himself with the slightest shake of his head, pretending to shake off the sea spray so she’d not notice the things that moved in his mismatched eyes (shadows and ghosts, and a mare of slim soft build).
He does not turn away from the brine that pelts him, but his nostrils reach for the scent of the horse that threads itself through the notes of salt and seawater. His lungs grab for the female smell that he recognizes and his mismatched eyes squeeze shut to another time and a place, a place that heard no song of the sea but of grass and wind, waves of deep green instead of the blue-black of a bruise.
How could he miss her so much?
It makes his heart constrict, a boa that squeezes then bites and he has to remember to breathe. But that smell is growing closer, edging out the brine that rims his nostrils in glistening droplets that slide against the length of his whiskers (he was ever a hairy beast!) before sliding off and splattering the sand, unnoticed and sucked back into the larger sum of tide that sucked at his feet planted deep in the sand. The sea could have swallowed him up if he let it, but she came close and closer still and provided him with a distraction even though the remembrance threatened to pull him back.
His gaze goes to her, to track the path of pale flax along her neck to the dangling damp ends that hung just above the sand beneath her small sure feet. She knows this beach better than he does, as he looks beyond her to the rocky monolith that had just been her perch as if she was a strange bird that kept watch of things only the sea and she knew about - things, that only he could guess at as his eyes came back to her as she spoke to him, his ears catching the lilt of her voice amidst the wind and the waves.
spear