one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
He was so quick to take the blame—so quick to just breathe it in and let it settle in his veins.
She wishes that he could see himself through her eyes. She wishes that he could see how good he is, how kind, how he has never deserved these injustices that have been played out against him. She wishes that she could tell him how his heart is a beautiful thing and it is to be cherished, to be protected at all costs.
But she does not spit up the truth with him as readily as she does with Beth.
She has some semblance of control and she keeps these thoughts locked tight.
Just a sad smile and a small shake to rid the dust that has settled onto her scales, her hair coming down in soft curves around her jaw. “You are so hard on yourself,” she says and she is a little more earnest with this, hoping that if she says it strongly enough, he will stop fighting it—will just accept the truth of it. “You have always loved your family, your friends, your land. You have been good to them.”
She has known him long enough to know this. At least this much.
There is a piece of her that almost tells him. Almost tells him about how she met a man who feels terribly important and how she doesn’t know how to handle it. How she is carrying his child and doesn’t feel any closer to him. How she dreams of the curve of his jaw and the feel of his warmth but picks fights like the child that she has always been. How he most likely hates her and she wouldn’t blame him if he did.
How he also fathered her sister’s firstborn.
How she carries the secret of it deep within her heart.
But, here, she is a secretive thing and she buries it deep.
“My family of vipers quite likes hating for fun,” she says, hoping to distract him with this.