you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you
She is accustomed to being the light: the flame that draws the moth. They have come to her since she was hardly a woman at all and have followed and followed no matter where she leads. This one though, this man who is only just a man does not strain toward her but comes only so far when she asks, just near enough to speak to her.
His face is hard, the lines sharper even than what she had seen from her sun drenched place in the meadow and her heart thunders. Kensa should see the way his wings mimic her pelt and know she has him but instead she is pinned to the earth by the feral intensity of his stare. “Kensa. Her name is given as an exhale, not with the usual scratch-and-flick confidence of a quill on paper. It’s a vulnerable sound and she repeats her name, trying to steady herself on the familiar syllables. “I’m Kensa.” Her topaz eyes leave his face to trail over the wine saturated angles of his body, self-consciously lingering on the closely held wings that mirror her skin.
“Where are you from, Brigade?” He is beautiful, solid and fierce like the mountains, frightening and awing her like the thunder. The little mustang is luxuriously lovely, but it is the sharp edge of nature that she craves: beauty that does not ask to be admired, wildness absent gentleness or forgiveness.
It takes Kensa a long time to look back to his face, and finds herself to have remembered the intensity of his stare and the solidness of his jawline poorly. An almost imperceptible gasp, her lungs surprised into action so that the breaths are taken in attractive little bursts like a damsel overwhelmed. She gives him a smile, but not to placate him into being something gentler or more pliant. “I’m from Hyaline, in the mountains to the north.”
Kensa
