It wasn’t the dress you imagined her in. Though perhaps you never really imagined her in a dress, at all.
Still, she looks beautiful, hands folded behind her back in the morning sun. You’ve watched her greet the day for years, every morning nearly the same as she bares her face to the warmth of the slowly-coloring sky. Every morning nearly the same, but never losing its magic. She is so beautiful, you think, and the feeling floods your chest like it always has; warm and full within your breast, and powerful enough to split your cheeks with a grin. You wish there were words for this sensation, but you’ve never seemed to find them, if they exist.
“I can feel you staring,” she drawls without looking, but you can feel the coy smirk in her tone. She doesn’t mean the warning she’s tucked into the words. And you take some achy sense of pride in the fact that Cassandra enjoys having your eyes on her. She told you once that they were the only ones she’d looked for in the thronging crowds that littered the streets on her coronation day. Your is name the one her servants repeat when they whisper to each other about what she says in her dreams.
“Just taking in the view,” you jest, and you don’t move to where she can see you; the joke lands better when she knows that your eyes are on the hidden swell of her hip, rather than on the red horizon.
“After all this time, I’m pleased that it still agrees with you,” she returns, and you smile because the dance has begun, once again. “At least enough to bring you back when you’ve gone away. Where was it, this time?”
“Antiva,” you sigh, taking one step toward her, and then another. This dance is slow, and you remind yourself that never do the partners meet. You hover behind her left shoulder and the breeze nearly damns you as it carries her scent along with it: incense, rose petals, a fading scent of steel. You close your eyes and think of which way to lead. “Rolling hills, cerulean seas,” you recount. “Both of them lovely, this time of year.”
She chuckles through her nose and closes her eyes, like she always does when she constructs an image in her mind. “I can’t imagine what it must have taken for you to leave.”
“Can’t you?” You breathe, and you can see the breath catch in her throat as the question runs down her spine. For a moment, you almost forget that she belongs to another. You almost forget whose bride she is; the Maker’s, not yours. For a moment, the knowledge that this is the dance you have consigned each other to nearly slips from your mind. Only nearly, though, because you must stay still though you ache to hold her—not to give her more reasons to call your name in the dead of night, but to comfort her. To lift that hat from her head, along with the weight of it.
She shifts the gravity you are so quickly succumbing to, turning to face you with eyes full of things neither of you will ever say aloud, again. Her gaze feels like fingers run down your cheek as she looks you over, and the dance slows to a languid crawl, each moment under her eyes stretching out into an eternity.
And with an abandon you cannot tell if you should have expected from her, she performs the forbidden step... and you are swept up in the beauty of it.
With gentle fingers, she seeks out your hand with her own to hold it fast and sure. Her eyes only waver from yours to close tight as she places a tender kiss to your palm, letting her cheek linger in their stay. “Can you imagine what it takes for me not to follow?” she whispers, and you can feel her own ache dripping from the words. You needn’t say anything else.
She doesn’t wear the dress you might have imagined her in. But her heart is on its sleeve, and her kiss is buried deep within your soul. You love it, just the same.
