01-20-2020, 12:09 PM
----------------kiss me until i can't speak
His gaze flicks to Halcyon, now half-asleep in the warm sun.
The boy was born the same spring as Adarra, and he’s clearly not reliant on his mother for food anymore. He’s seen his daughter grazing; she too is old enough to be independent. Independent enough that he wouldn’t need to worry about feeding her at least, Adarra is still far from an adult and certainly needs supervision.
“I’m jealous,” he admits to her. “I know I don’t have any right to be, but that doesn’t change what I feel.” The thought of someone else touching Aquaria is less painful than the image of her accepting it. The corners of her amethyst eyes crinkle in his favorite way when she greets him after time away, and that she might look exactly that way at someone else causes a cold curl in his belly. The boy in Hyaline feels impossibly far away, and Pteron has closed away the half of his heart that has been cold since their meeting in Taiga. No amount of artificial happiness can lighten that weight, and so he chooses simply not to look at it. He is weak in so many ways.
Once more he looks back at the boy, now belly-up and fast asleep. He is the very image of contentment, and Pteron cannot help but smile. Adarra would like Halcyon, he thinks to himself, the two seem rather alike. He can bring her here too, he knows. They could both come, leave Taiga and Reia behind and make a life here in this tropical paradise. It’s a fantasy, Pteron knows. So to the already impossible image he adds Aegean joining them.
The speed with which the picture of Aegean playing in the bioluminescent waves with Aquaria changes to something sensual should have been a clue. Taiga’s trees don’t change with the seasons, and he’d left the woods on a day warm enough to be summer. It certainly doesn’t feel like Fall here in Ischia. Pteron shakes away the fantasy. There is no use dwelling on things that cannot be. The violence of that head shake bumps his muzzle briefly against Aquaria’s. He pulls away as quickly as if her skin were fire. But it was not. It had been cool and smooth, her aquatic scales reminiscent of the mother-of-pearl she’d shown him inside a shell beneath the sea. The memory of that entire encounter returns with a rush of heat, and Pteron attempts to take a step away.
He fails, as he often does.
“I’ve put you in danger by coming here,” Pteron reminds her. Perhaps that will make her step away, he thinks. Perhaps she’ll put the space between them that he is somehow unable to. “And I won’t ever do it again.”
He means this just as much as he’d meant his vows to Reia, even if he does not let himself think of the comparison.
“You deserve so much better than I can give you.” It is not the first time Pteron thought this, and this is not the first kiss he’s tentatively placed on the soft edge of her mouth. “Tell me to stop coming back, and I will.” Tell me to stop, he says, laying the decision squarely at her hooves. He has managed to elicit her temper once already; surely this will be enough for her to lash out and tell him that she hadn’t meant what she says, that she really does want him to leave.
He tries to memorize the salt taste of her in case this is his last chance. Once more he fails to pull away, though he does fight away the urge to pull her closer. The shift from friends to something more had been as easy for Pteron as breathing. Aquaria is everything he has ever wanted in a companion and a lover. Pteron has closed away his love for Aegean, and in its absence there is room for something else. “Or tell me to stay,” he breathes against her pale cheek, “And I will do my best to deserve you.” His voice quivers, just for a moment, but he catches it and adds: “Even if it means defying a dragon.”
-- pteron --
@[Aquaria]