[private] I couldn't utter my love when it counted; birthing

[adna]

one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing
one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide

She would take her daughter’s hate if she could.

She would swallow it down and lock it behind the cage of her heart. She would keep it there forever. She would do it if she thought it would help. She would do it if she thought that, for a second, it would do any good. But she knows that they are from a line of vipers and for all of the hate that she could swallow, there would only be more to replace it.

She would drown in it before it stopped.

But Adna has seen her own heart heal, and Sabbath has said that her father has found something like a second chance in life, so she has hope for Gospel.

Has hope for them all.

It is easier to hope when she is like this, with her daughter at her feet and her cheek to Beth’s chest, and something like joy sparking in her veins. It is easier to hope and to think perhaps she will find something like a happy ending. She smiles against his words, even when they have a bitter bite and she shudders against the truth in them.

“I was never very good at hating you,” she admits because that’s easier than telling him exactly how she feels and how much it terrifies her to feel that way. How she has come to known the depths of it so deeply and so completely and she has known it so quickly.

But she can’t admit these things just yet.

So she presses another kiss to the deep curve of his chest, then lets her mouth glide up and over his neck to his jaw where she lingers, breathing in him. Her eyes close as she leans against his neck, feeling exhausted but somehow completely awake here.

“I missed you,” she says, and this time she does not have to fight to get there.

It just is.

ADNA