one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling
one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She is terrified of the magnitude of her feelings. She is terrified of how quickly they sit on the edge of herself—how quickly she could succumb to them. She would drown in the way she feels about it; she would never grow tired of it. But she has made a promise that she wouldn’t push that on him any longer. She wouldn’t ever force her love on him and instead she wakes up every morning and swallows it down.
So they walk in silence, edging toward the border of Taiga, and she feels her throat close around it.
She will burn with it one day, she thinks, but she will never say it.
She burns further when he asks her questions and she prickles underneath it but doesn’t flinch. She refuses to turn to the venom that rests on the back of her tongue. Because he has always been there with his questions and his honesty and the way that his eyes never close off or never become guarded.
But she doesn’t answer right away.
She walks for several minutes in silence as she tries to sort out her thoughts.
When she finally reaches a place where she feels like she can articulate her thoughts, she takes a deep breath. “Myself, maybe.” Her brow furrows. “I have a habit of ruining all of the good in my life—or, at the very least, taking the bad and making it worse.” She thinks of the secrets she has kept. She had not been the root of that poison, but was she not to blame for not thrusting it into the sunshine? Was she not the true villain for knowing and not telling Sabbath, not telling Beth? Even if she hadn’t intended to do wrong, she cannot help but wonder if she didn’t because she was scared of losing him.
Scared that he might choose her sister and not her.
Choose that family and not theirs.
She swallows hard and fights the fear that forms like tears at the corners of her eyes.