“No, I…” It’s not agreement. It’s a protest. Margarethe’s first instinct is always to resist.
Her voice peters out. She only looks at Pamela, brows drawn together, frown gathering on her lips, the recalcitrant look of a child who sees a hated thing looming, a bath or a brushing of the hair or a green vegetable. It’s the vulnerability of that word: feel. Admitting there’s a soft, sensitive thing locked inside the lacquered, painted shell. Something that feels. Something that hopes. Something that can be denied.
She tries again. “I’m sure I don’t know what on earth…” The words die. It’s hard, being so caught between her opposing desires: to bristle, defensive, derisive, and deflect such pointed evidence of her feelings; to give in, with all her natural greed, to what seems to be precisely what she wants, dangling before her eyes.
“You certainly don’t make it easy, do you, Pamela,” she mutters. She wants to have it both ways. She punctuates the sentence with her hand on Pamela’s arm, a slow stroke up from her wrist, red nails bright. Ordinarily, Margarethe doesn’t like such lingering touch.
❝ nothing worth pursuing is ever EASY, Margarethe. surely you must know that. ❞
The woman is a mystery: Travers has never met a soul more full of CONTRADICTIONS than herself, leather-bound-pages padlocked with GRIM IRON, and yet this one manages it with COOL EASE. She sees in her that same reluctance, RESISTANCE to lower one’s boundaries, to accept the frivolity of those wretched feelings and peel back the layer of red, strict lip to expose the PINK of vulnerability. ( Russel would say that they were made of the SAME STARDUST. ) The poet in her only longs to prod at the yet-sheathed passion, an errant tongue DELVING into the cavity of forgone tooth with desperate curiosity.
Nails burn like ICE up her arm, but she eyes them only for a moment: rather, gaze remains TRAINED on the intensity of irises glinting malevolent as GREEK FIRE, an unvoiced challenge issued with unwavering resolve. She wants more, to touch and stroke until embers bear FLAME, but she restrains with STIFF UPPER LIP, merely capturing the errant hand for her own and pressing a POMEGRANATE stain to the ridge of knuckles. ( in mind’s eye, she is at her wrist, a kiss along the veins of forearm, to shoulder, to bared, white throat. ) But she says nothing. There is only the quiet hunger in her eyes.
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
annaxmalina
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
jbbartram-illu
