one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Her heart clenches in her chest at the way that it feels to have his lips against her. She feels a shiver race up her spine and she hopes that he cannot notice the way that he affects her; the way that even the barest of contact or the smallest way that he softens is nearly enough to undo her. So she stills and feels the breath as it hitches in her throat, her pulse spike and then steady beneath the calm of his presence.
She brings her gaze back from the horizon to him, study his face.
“You’re probably right,” she breathes and she can’t decide if it is relief or panic that she feels when she realizes that her youngest daughter has not sought out her extended family. On one hand, she would have at least been relieved to know that Gospel was walking into the embrace of her mother (for all of her misgivings about her family, she knew that Leliana and Vulgaris would fight to the last breath to protect their own). On the other hand, she is not ready to face Sabbath with Beth by her side.
Maybe she never would be.
She waves around the wave of anxiety that she experiences every time she considers the secret that she has been hiding, the one that blossoms beneath her skin like poison.
She brushes it away. She’ll deal with it later.
Instead she nods. “Then we should walk that way. Through Loess I guess.” The name is bitter on her tongue when she thinks about growing up there and then being run out and everything in between.
She bites it back.
“If we start now, we will have a few hours of daylight left.”
For a second, she startles, sage eyes widening. “I mean,” she had promised herself that she would never ask more of him than he offered and here she was assuming he would search with her. “Only if you have the time. I can just walk there.” She swallows. “I didn’t mean to just assume.”