we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea
She does not understand much of this world. Everything of her childhood had been shortcut and then even her young adult wanderings had been cut short for a life sheltered on the small island off of Ischia. But even if she had been afforded a full life of exploration—even if her years had been full of nothing but learning everything about what Beqanna had to offer—she still would not have been able to understand him. He is so wildly different. So different than anything that she could have ever experienced.
But that does not stop her from wanting to learn.
Everything in her leans into the experience—leans into him. It pitches her forward slightly, almost reaching for the nothing feel of him that he had so abruptly yanked from her. “Everything,” she answers, not trying to play coy or shield herself. She does not consider whether she should be embarrassed of this.
“All of you,” she follows up and without thinking, she takes another step forward toward him before she pulls up short. Her scales glisten underneath the faint light and she longs for the water, feeling that strange sensation of drying, but it does not override her desire to be here. “What did you already know?”
She catches the faint wheeze in his voice though, and it triggers something in the back of her mind. She does not have much experience with illness, but Woolf had instilled enough knowledge of it for her to recognize it, finally. “Are you ill?” She angles a delicate head, perking her ears and studying him.
“You are more than that to me,” she says. “At least, I think that you are.”
After all, she does not know what an idea truly is—not like this.
“Perhaps you really are just something I thought up.”
A recanting of her previous statement, but she does not mind wavering.
“Does that make you mine?”
