She might have laughed at his words if not for the way they made her ache inside, speechless and guarded and so completely closed off. No one is here for me. She thinks at him, chin turned slightly away as if she means to look past him, into the dark and the forest, into the sentient trees. But she finds her gaze will not leave him, stays quietly locked in the act of learning him.
The wolfish grin on his lips that gives her pause, draws her brows down and together in a beautiful, distrustful furrow. The muscle corded along his neck and over his shoulders, along his back and even down through his hips. It writhes when he shrugs at her, thick and rippling and she suspects he has done so deliberately. She is careful not to react, not to give him anything yet.
"Only surprising in that no one knows I come here." Her tone is patient, but the words are laced with the wary way her pulse seems to come alive in her chest. "And," she pauses, her delicate gold jaw tightening for a moment while she considers him, examines his face in the dark and is sure she does not know him, "in that you know my name, and I know nothing of you."
It feels like a dangerous admission, despite that they both know they've never met and this isn't new news. It feels like admitting he has the upper hand here.
Does he?
But she is not left to dwell on it long because suddenly her world is changing. Muting. But how can that be? Her head lifts, those dark, amber eyes scanning the forest around them with an almost frantic urgency. She can see the way the wind still whispers through the leaves, see the branches rub together and know the sound of the aching creak that should come with the motion. But there is nothing, just nothing.
She does not even realize how hard she is breathing - or the graceless steps forward she's taken, the way her pale wings have unfurled wide and impressive. Does not realize because it makes no sound. She cannot even hear the drumbeat her own heart pounds against her breaking ribs, not the roar of her pulse flooding through her ears. There is only silence and the copper stench of blood on her tongue.
She turns her face to him abruptly, had almost forgotten the mulberry man was there at all in this strange, deafening quiet. But she remembers now, draws herself up in a bearing that is both wild and beautiful, and completely borrowed from some deep, fearful instinct. Her eyes settle on his face, too rich to be gold, too pale to be red. Then she speaks, feeling all her breath trapped nervously within her chest (trapped so he cannot see it, cannot find pleasure in it). "Where is my heartbeat?" Each word still whispered, or at least she thinks so, but the sound feels so wrong (so right, so soft, so gentle), so different from what she has always known. "Are you killing me?"
marble
@[laura]