I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
There is one singular moment when she thinks the sound of his voice is the ice breaking.
It crashes around her all the same.
It wedges the same terror into the empty space around her hard-beating heart.
It sends her reeling, skittering away from the sound of it so that she puts a back foot through the ice and the cold spurs her back up the bank. She burns hot with shame as she clumsily thrusts a wide berth between herself and the river’s edge. She swallows thickly, so embarrassed that she cannot bring herself to look at him. She presses her mouth tightly closed and studies the ice where she’d nearly fallen through.
Had he called out to her before or after she’d collapsed in on herself and lunged for the bank? His anger seeps into the marrow of her bones, rakes her throat raw. She blinks, uncertain why an apology alights on her tongue. She is a scorned child, several years removed from her youth, but hanging her head regardless.
Was she trying to get herself killed? Finally, she summons up the nerve to meet his eye. Is she surprised by what she finds there? Her chest is still heaving with fear and adrenaline and something else, too. Something she doesn’t know. “I-,” she begins and then sews her mouth up tight again. Her voice quivers and she shakes her head. The antlers make her think of Velkan and how her joy had filled her to bursting and she squeezes her eyes shut so tightly that they ache.
“I wasn’t thinking,” she whispers, thinking this is somehow better than the string of apologies that line her throat. “I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t...” But there is nothing to the thought and it ends there, abruptly.
lilian
