"I want to… apologize, for my behavior,“ Alastrine didn’t apologize–and her lack of experience must have been apparent, with her fidgeting fingers and eyes darting this way and that. Not on his face, anywhere but his face, though she longed to set her gaze upon it, see how it looked back at her. But how could she, when that same face had seen her cry, nearly weep before him? The scene played over and over in her head, each time ending with her cheeks flushing red from embarrassment. Was her infatuation with George so apparent, that she’d allowed him to slip past any defenses she’d previously set up, or had he torn them down himself?
She contemplated this, drawing closer in the corridor she’d abruptly snatched him in. Alastrine sat a hand upon his shoulder, eyes settling upon his collarbone, and ran a thumb, affectionately, over his neck, "You see, I’m quite taken with you. And as it were, your words moved me in the most pure of ways. I don’t think I could bear it if you didn’t accept my apology.”
“It wasn’t an offense”, George emphasized, appealed, but the lack of some endearment term woven into the sentence, the lack of their usual gallows humor, rather contradicted him. “It was simply...--”, he broke off, though whether it owed to her touch or to a deeper incapacity to convey realness, he couldn’t say. But it ran through him and nailed his will down to the earth. Impaled, the viscount could only shuffle under the woman’s hand, away yet not quite. He flicked his hair back; self-absorption? Or a theatrical diversion, something he must’ve picked up from his sister, from Mark or even Alastrine herself?
“If I knew purity terrified you to such extent, I would’ve conducted myself rather differently on numerous occasions.” He tried to chuckle, put to use the huskiness in his throat, one with which he knew he could subjugate hearts and tempers alike. Yet something had collapsed - or perhaps risen? - a pillar or a boundary, a disguise, a sunshade, a pedestal. Like watching your father cry for the first time. Or seeing your wife in the throes of birth, your usual matrimony bed now turned into a beast, a draconian entity of sorts, seeped with milk and blood and herbs that did not fool you about its perverse intent. Yes, lines had been redressed. Redrawn.
“Christ, you must love him, don’t you?” He put the question matter of factly, though only the Creator himself knew whence it sprung, from wisdom or a jar or some deviant wish to dig his own pitfall. Spoon up the earth and gobble on it, why in damnation not?
