YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
That is her dilemma when it comes to Skandar.
When he is this close, she can feel the fire simmering beneath his star-marked skin. She can feel all his rage and his violence; she is all-too-aware of the storms broiling within him and it always lights something in her. He has been in the Darkness and Aela can sense that, too.
Because when he comes this close, she is aware that part of her had gone dark with him. And now, now - suddenly @[Skandar] is here and he is bringing so much to light. He is making her aware of how much she had dimmed over their time apart - that he had been, perhaps, the very reason for it - and she resents him.
She resents him taking it away and she resents him for bringing it back.
It is an obvious, glaring truth go Aela. As obvious to her as the way that she tilts her head up to him, moving away from his throat and letting her blue eyes level with the skinwalker. This admission - coming from anybody else - would have pleased Aela and she would have found a way to twist and toy with it. For anyone that would have said that they could not forget Aela - whose every lovely curve is a trap meant to entice and ensnare - she might have smiled and continued to spin a web that she is trying weave across Beqanna.
Anybody else might have been a pawn; but this is not anybody else.
This is Skandar and she could no more forget him than he could forget her.
Her breath ghosts along his skin - haunts along constellations and galaxies - but she does not move any closer. It had always seemed like an unspoken rule between them - Skandar who knew that he was not to touch Aela - but now it feels like Aela who knows not to touch Skandar. Like some part of her knows that touch him would be too damn them both.
That to touch him would be the end of them before they even got started.
"Do you think you could?" she challenges the larger horse, turning her head ever so slightly so that she could look up at him. His skin shimmers as her pulse starts to race. Aela extends her lovely neck and offers Skandar a chance at what he had once offered her. "Go ahead," she murmurs as she looks ahead, "rip me apart."
