one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She never thought that such a simple question would come to hurt her so much.
She never thought about how it might twist into her, how it much make her vision blurry—how her breath could so quickly leave her lungs. But it does the second that she hears the name. The second that it is her sister who is saying his name. Adna swallows hard and feels reality tip underneath her.
For a second, and then two, she is just quiet as she tries to stop herself from screaming.
Finally, she forces herself to talk—the same way that she has forced herself forward after her encounter with Beth. How she had built a wall around her agony. But this time, it’s more important because the wall is not there to protect herself as much as it is there to protect her sister—to somehow keep her safe.
“You’re special to me,” she says quietly, her heart pounding in her chest. She reaches over and presses her fanged kiss to her sister’s cheek, wondering about the broken horn and the pain that must have led her sister to do it. Was she destined to only hurt those around her? Would she only hurt Sabbath more?
She forces herself to smile.
“Prayer is a beautiful name,” and she imagines a filly with his grave eyes, his dark coloring. She imagines what her own child will be like. She imagines and her throat goes dry. “Was he,” the words come out before she can stop them, before she can pull them back, and she finds that she is helpless to do anything but tumble over with them, letting her body break on the back of the rocks, “Was he special to you?”
Was he as special to her as he was to Adna?
Did she find herself staring in the shadows to find his shape?
Did she, too, know the queer way he could punch clean through a heart?