[mature] things we never thought we could be, adna

[bethlehem]

sometimes i wonder, will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? B E T H L E H E M then i look around and realize, god left this place a long time ago He has never considered himself a proud man. Bethlehem, in all the years he’s lived, has never had anything worth being proud of. So, it doesn’t take swallowing his pride. It doesn’t take grinning and bearing the bitter taste of resignation. There is nothing to swallow except his breath as she turns to face him again. Unsurprisingly, he does not have an answer for her now either. Why? Why should she stay when he has given her no reason to think his company worthwhile? Why should she stay when he has done nothing but shirk her attempts at finding some common ground? He drags in a shuddering breath and he thinks about the crippling loneliness that sometimes plagues him. A side effect, no doubt, of choosing to live his life alone. He thinks about the anger and the vitriol and the grief she had laid bare for him. He thinks about the way her teeth had skirted along the vulnerable plains of the jugular just beneath the surface of his skin and how, in that moment, he had hoped so fiercely that she’d make good on her threat that it had almost taken him to his knees. How viciously he had wanted her to extinguish the dark flame at the center of him. Her expression shifts around the edges of something he doesn’t know how to identify as she takes a step back into his orbit. She stops short then, armed with another iteration of her question and he answers by closing up the distance that remains between them. He answers by skirting his teeth along the curve of her shoulder, dragging his mouth across the landscape of her scaled skin to bring it to rest against her spine again. “I’d like it if you stayed,” he murmurs then, his voice catching thick in his throat. It’s not an answer, really, but it’s the most he can offer.