11-20-2019, 08:20 PM
----------------kiss me until i can't speak
There is not an immediate eruption, not of words or teeth or fire. Rather than put him at ease, the stillness serves only to heighten her wariness. Reia is not a creature of long pauses. She has a temper as quick as her wit, and for her to not react is a bad sign – perhaps the very worst. Pteron’s breathing slows, each inhale increasingly likely to be his last, and then she finally moves.
That is slow too, she slides forward like the honey that drips from her tongue. Sticky, he thinks, impossible to get out of his hair. Her words are as sweet as her touch, and Pteron is stiff beneath them. Reia is tenderizing the meat, he thinks, waiting for him to let his guard down so that she might strike just as he relaxes. This close, he can smell the ash of her, the heat that smells of blurred horizons and her burning skin. Her shoulder slides against his, and he swallows tightly. He is weak, he remembers, and it would be easy to give in, to give her what she wants. Take her back to Taiga, like her father had commanded. A cold slip of dread suddenly falls into his belly – is this why her presence in the woods had been a condition of his mother’s departure. Does Castile know that Pteron is responsible for his daughter’s widening belly?
He must, Pteron imagines; and Reia’s demands have a sudden and unexpected weight to them. Do not leave me alone with our child, she tells him, and Pteron nearly protests. But that would be a foolish thing to do. He wouldn’t leave the child. No, he will take it instead, and leave Reia. He does not have any idea how to raise a baby, but he will figure it out. Even his bumbling efforts will be better than a life with Reia, and he is trying to formulate this into an argument that will leave him with all his body parts when she inches nearer. Every thought leaves him mind as she does.
Who are they, she demands, just when Pteron is certain that there can be no worse turn to this conversation.
He knows what will happen if he denies her, but better she rip him apart than touch a hair on that white head.
“No. What I do is none of your business.” That’s not enough, he thinks, she is a dragon with a bone; she will not let this drop. Not unless he gives her something else, something to distract her. For a moment he thinks of kissing her, of luring her to complacency in a manner that his saved his wings a time or too. But the idea of touching her makes him nauseous, and it would not even be enough. Not unless…
Pteron reaches forward, stepping toward when she scoffs it him, and brushes his lips against her cheek. “They don’t really matter to you, do they?” he asks, moving forward to kiss the place beside her jaw that always makes her quiver. “Just like you don’t matter to them. You’re just a broodmare, after all, nothing important.” A last ditch effort, he knows, but perhaps if she expends her rage destroying him she will lose interest in pursuing them.
@[Reia]
-- pteron --