(cw: brief sexual mention. additional note: caora/brienne and stories about her involve pregnancy as a theme of horror (in varying ways, but most specifically as a tool of control over women and as a trigger for dysphoria -- the ways that these are in play are subtle, and i’m unlikely to ever spell them out explicitly), so if you’re sensitive to such topics, you may wish to avoid reading. art credit: detail from the bacchante by jean-leon gerome.)
*
Ticks are opportunistic feeders. What this means is that if a tick gets its mandibles deep enough into a hound that the dog is unable to shake it off, the parasite will feed, and feed, and feed until it begins to swell beyond the bounds of its chitinous shell. Its very nature is to gorge itself on another being’s lifesblood until it grows so large that it ruptures, hemorrhaging from the inside until it snuffs itself out, still working in vain to suck down more.
One might believe that the sin at work here is gluttony, or greed, but these are overly simplistic assessments. The true failing in this regard is apathy.
I thought to myself of the tick -- round as a child’s marble, so big that its black shell stretches and warps until it turns thin and pale green -- when Caora showed herself to me. My mind was drawn to her like a body rolling toward a dip in a mattress, a vacant spot in the background hum of the Twelveswood, only notable for what it lacked or obscured. Something that should not be.
The fear that frosted my heart did not thaw. Caora appeared to me as a hyuran woman, or seemingly so, shifting restlessly through the trees while shrouded in peasants’ clothes made of a flowing green fabric that accentuated the swelling of her belly. A glamour made her face soft and her hair flaxen, but unfocusing the soul’s eye made her true form come forth out of Hydaelyn’s fabric: long hair as red as autumn’s leaves, black sclera obscuring her gaze, and horns of the ram protruding with a delicate sort of grace from her head. She was not difficult to behold in either form. Quite the opposite; she was beautiful. Alluring, warm. Caora was so bright with the aether of life -- no, other lives, stolen lives -- that she nearly shone with it, plump to bursting with foreign lifesblood.
This was the dissonance: My mind recognized her for what she was, a voidsent supping on the aether of whatever poor woman it had possessed, but my heart, even so chilled as it was, ached to help her. She was lost and with child, after all, somehow still so pathetic to me despite her ruinous claws and teeth. For would the being that puppets her not show me the softer, youthful face when I arrived? Wide, helpless eyes, begging for my assistance to get her to shelter? I could pretend it was real. We could have such a nice time together, couldn’t we? She would pay me a favor in kind for a good deed, with no mind paid to the ultimate price. She would have let me--
No... no. Not her. The voidsent that used her as an umbilicus through which to drink of this world, it was the one that would have me. Mayhap it had even fed on the fruits of the forest as an emergency measure, without Spoken aether to take? I--
I knew not where she was hiding in those woods, but we locked eyes across the rhythm of the wilderness, two sinking holes in the fabric of the world, and the moment she curled her finger I still wanted nothing more than to go to her. The simple but practiced gesture made my body act without my intervention, a poppet guided by a malicious hand. My spine straightened against the tree’s bark. I attempted to rise to my frost-numbed feet. Blood flowed in a violent rush to places of me that it did not belong, not just then, not like that.
No!
Our connection -- the thread along which we attuned to each other’s vibration from across the distance -- tenuous as it was, broke in the same moment that my meditation dissolved. I came back to myself as though I was punched back into my own body. Abdominal muscles braced hard, breathing hard, cock hard. I gasped for air, using the sturdy trunk of a very old tree to hold myself upright. As Caora faded from me, so did her effects. With time, I relaxed, softened, until my knees began to quiver. It wasn’t just the fear; I was dehydrated, too. Hungry. All around me the sky was dark and the night buzzed with the hum of unknowable life -- and somewhere, in the distance, waited an unknowable void.
VERY slight NSFW implication. Not actually enough to put in the title really.
“Thank you for making the trip from the East gentleman, but if you’re not going to offer serious figures then I do hope you’ve made better plans to enjoy Eorzea.” The sea wolf drops her attention away from the two raen standing in her office down to an open ledger in front of her. It didn’t contain any actual figures, just one long set up as a prop for meetings like this so no one’s wandering eye caught something it shouldn’t. “My girl outside can escort you out..”
“Now, there’s no reason to be so hasty, Miss Bremwyda. We merely are unused to the.. high expense of doing business with the West. What your asking would be a laughable insult in our homeland, we thought perhaps it was some form of Eorzean joke. We would be willing to come up to say.. twenty percent.” The more talkative of the two men did let his eye wander to the door briefly as she’d spoken of the girl sitting outside, but didn’t feel any need to address the blonde further than that. His partner continued to brood like his face was permanently carved into a mask of moderate, bordering on intense frustration with existence itself. “It would be nearly unheard of for our organization but.. I’m sure the exotic nature would spark interest in Hingashi.”
A theatrical flick sends her ledger closed as she looks back up to the pale scaled man, lips slightly twisted to one side. “Twenty-four percent, not a single.. whatever nonsense currency you peddle in less. Otherwise I might as well just throw it into the sea and hope that coin washes back up on the shore.” A momentary pause lingers before she holds up a hand, palm raised. “I am not unreasonable, however. Set up costs eat away at the dealer far more than supplier when going into a new market. The first two shipments will come to you at cost to help you create demand.” The glance hadn’t been lost on the roe, and a smile starts to creep it’s way onto her lips. “I need a couple of moments gentleman to speak with one of my.. associates to confirm we can meet your time tables. But, I wouldn’t leave you without some entertainment while I’m away.”
There’s an exchange of bows as she stands from her desk and makes for the door, pulling it firmly shut behind her. It takes barely more than a stride to bring her to the tiny desk setup for her blonde assistant, the woman already looking up to the roegadyn slightly puzzled as to why she was out of her office but the au’ra hadn’t come with her. Before the Ishgardian could actually get out a question, Brem’s fished out a sack of coin and drops it onto the smaller woman’s lap. “You’re about to earn a sale closing commission, Miss Fallow.”
Brienne was a feral little thing, scared and sneaky.
She’d holed up in an abandoned greenhouse near a construction site in the Black Shroud, which had proven really fucking difficult to find after she quit both of her jobs and stopped traveling to and from the cities. Luckily for Makoto, K’tara was good at her job. Maybe one of the best. A couple of weeks of sniffing around was all it took for K’tara to track her down, passing Makoto a map to exactly where he’d find the blonde shrew, curled up on a mattress next to a wall of endless glass panels. Each one twinkled with yellow-tinted winter sunlight, specifically focused to make the interior of the building unseasonably warm.
Feral, maybe, but smart.
Her makeshift apartment was stocked in equal measure with jars of honey and jars of paint, with half-painted canvasses stacked in disarray and in various states of completion. Portraits, almost all of them. Makoto spent a long time studying the vaguely elezen faces while Brienne went through the resigned motions of making tea for her unannounced guest. Most of them bore a passing resemblance to the artist, with delicate features and dull jade eyes framed by golden-spun hair, but none of them were explicitly her. Not exactly. Siblings, maybe. Or children. She looked too young to have children already, but you never knew.
They were almost like drafts. Like with each attempt she was getting closer and closer to some truth.
Brienne wrapped her well-worn blankets and shawls around her like they were regal vestments or ceremonial armor, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her feet curled inward to support her growing belly. She stared coldly at him over the hot tea in her lap, wisps of steam floating up around her face while Makoto laid out what he wanted from her.
Framed on all sides by growing vines, she seemed curiously nonplussed by his requests, almost serene under her annoyance at being found. A picture of motherly indulgence. “You wouldn’t have any trouble breaking in. The shrine is usually guarded only by an elderly woman and one of those Xaela who don’t speak.” The teacup paused on the way to her mouth, and Brienne added, “She might put up a fight, but it isn’t like she’ll be talking to the Brass Blades about anything she sees. You... you aren’t going to hurt anyone, are you?”
“Not if I don’t have to.” Makoto lied, turning a honeycomb over and over, watching the edges grow fat with honey and ooze slowly into the small bone porcelain cup. This was a different ritual than he was used to, but he was in Brienne’s home. Her home, her tea rules. “There shouldn’t be any surprises, if what you say is true. No surprises is good, it means nobody has to get hurt. You’re not lying about anything, are you? Even by omission?”
Brienne shook her head, her mouth pulled into a short, thin line of distaste. Perhaps her compliance didn’t go down as smoothly as the tea. “I don’t understand why you care, though. About the shrine. It’s just a teahouse. They’re nice people.”
He didn’t care about the shrine, but Brienne didn’t need to know the details. “You’re smart, you know I can’t tell you that.” The drink tasted more like liquid honey than tea, hot and sugary, thick like nectar on the way down his throat.
Her eyes traveled over the tattoos on his arms, following the flow of the waves. “...Is Miss Ietada in trouble with... uh, with you? I thought she was Yanxian...?”
“Nah, this has nothing to do with her.” That part was true. His cup settled back into the saucer with a loud little clink, and Makoto put his hands on his thighs and leaned forward, studying her closely. “Look, I’m not here to just shake you down and offer nothing in return. What can I do to help you? You’ve gotta need something out here.” He waved a hand, gesturing at their remote location, the disarray of her surroundings.
Brienne’s eyes went glassy and distant for a moment, staring through him. “Love Potion,” she said, automatic, the words dropping like shards of a mirror.
His eyebrows twisted up. What the fuck is she talking about? “You want a love potion?” Flat, unbelieving.
“No, that’s just what it’s called.” Her tone bit back on spite, as if she could sense his incredulity, but her teacup chittered tellingly against its saucer when her hands began to shake. “It’s--it’s a drug. A man named Maxime makes it, or knows someone who makes it. He isn’t very smart, and neither is his girlfriend. Her name’s Ivy. I can write down their address.”
The trembling in her voice hit Makoto like a familiar old friend, and he greeted it with a gentle, placating tone of his own. “Whatever it is, I can get it for you. Or something just like it. How much do you want?”
“How much can you get?” Something changed on her face, like a flipped switch. The vulnerability, the distress, all of that stayed, but the chill deepened, sinking briefly into a diamond-hard resolution. As soon as Makoto registered it, it was gone again, leaving only the scared, pregnant young girl in its wake. “I just, I--” She was pleading, but didn’t seem to know what she was asking for.
“Okay. I get it, I understand. Anything else?”
Brienne stared at him for a long moment, the ice in her demeanor melting, bubbling up as inexplicable tears on the fat part of her cheek. It took time for her to summon what she wanted to say, long enough for Makoto to finish about half of his tea. He glanced off to the side, back to the portraits, letting her cry in relative privacy while he perused her menagerie.
“Can you touch me?” Barely audible, a timorous whisper wavered on the way out.
At first, Makoto wasn’t sure he heard her right. “What? Like, uh.” His eyes snapped back to her, hesitantly appraising. In another context, she might have been objectively pretty, but it was hard to find her sexy all the way out here in the godsdamned boonies, surrounded by her nest of clutter and not much else. She was so fucking helpless, not to mention visibly pregnant.
She followed his eyes down to her lightly swollen stomach, letting out a low breath, like this was exactly what she expected. “Nevermind,” she spat without much force, manufactured to cover her disappointment.
“No, no. Hey, wait.” He picked himself up and crossed over to her, sitting down on the floor and resting an arm on the blanket draped around her shoulders. “It’s not like that, okay. I’ve got... people. People I have to consider.”
“I don’t want a pity fuck.” As though that wasn’t exactly what she was about to ask for.
Makoto’s guts twisted with indecision, and he bought time by reaching up to wipe her tears away from the apples of her cheeks with his thumbs. Whoever Brienne was, she needed something, that much was clear. Maybe sex was only part of the picture. Maybe it would be a kindness. Makoto was already in the business of finding loopholes for the sake of kindness, but something still nagged at him.
Everything was too... just-so. Brienne was the perfect, pitiful picture of a sad, lonely woman in need. Something was off, specifically because everything fit just right. Paranoia filtered through his mind like cream blending into tea. “Let me get the job done first, then I’ll come back with your Love Potion, yeah? Maybe if it all goes well, we can take it together. How about that?”
Brienne nodded, looking away with a flicker of embarrassment. It would have to do for now, at least until Makoto had Ichika Tanaka on a boat back to Kugane, all trussed up with a big red bow on top, a gift for his father.
Then he could figure out what the fuck to do with Brienne Fallow.
(cw: explicit sexual content, drug use, power imbalance, I have no idea how to accurately tag the consent issues involved here, so use your good judgement)
(Follows the events of this post by Brem.)
The two raen businessmen waiting for Brienne in Bremwyda’s office looked like they’d rather be anywhere else on Hydaelyn than in this particular room, where Brem’s massive desk took up all the real estate and forced everyone else to hunker down in the thin space along the wall. They sat on opposite ends of the black couch, the chatty one by the door looking up at her when she entered, and the squat, unpleasant one staring a hole in the safe under Brem’s desk. The meeting schedule listed them as Misters Akata and Hirota, though she didn’t know which was which.
“In Hingashi, ‘business entertainment’ generally means sake or tea.” The closer raen made a pointed look at Brienne’s empty hands and leaned back into the sofa, which gave a creaking sigh under his shifting weight. His companion muttered something short and blunt in Hingan, followed by a brusque laugh.
Brienne chuckled easily, despite not getting the joke, and strode behind the desk to the minibar. “In Gridania, it usually means ale, but I can get whatever you like from the kitchen downstairs.” She grabbed a crystal decanter of brandy and poured two shallow lowballs from the fancy set, palming a small vial of rose-colored liquid as she worked with her back facing them. Brem had intended the dose for Brienne, but she had a better idea. Half a dose in each glass, just enough to tease. “But that’s only if you decide you want me to leave, sir.”
The silent one looked away from her ass the moment she turned around, and Brienne shined the full force of her customer service smile at him when she stepped back around to the near side of the desk, her knees bumping against his leg as she passed him the brandy. For now, he seemed immune to her charm, giving little more than a grunt and another curt comment in Hingashi. Colorful tattoos hid just behind the line of his sleeve, poking out briefly as he reached for the glass of amber spirits.
“Hirota says he’s suffocating in this dusty closet. Perhaps we could all head downstairs?” The other raen spread his arms along the back of the couch while Brienne wedged herself into the thin space between them, sliding her palm over--presumably--Akata’s thigh as she handed him the other drink. She bounced lightly as the couch cushion gave another rude squeak, protesting every shift and adjustment on its long-suffering form.
Both men tucked into their drinks right away, one resolutely not looking at her, and the other glancing with little fanfare at her breasts, which struggled against the neckline of her retainer outfit with every breath. The raen were both twice her size, radiating a heat that seemed to fill the small room and made the backs of her legs stick to the leather seat. As unpleasant as he was, Hirota was right. This office was little more than a coffin.
“When Miss Brem returns with the confirmation paperwork, you can both have the run of the foyer, I promise you.” She squeezed Akata’s leg and chanced to slip her other palm onto Hirota’s knee, sneaking her way into their laps like creeping ivy. Neither of them responded to her, speaking quietly over her head in foreign tones that rolled through her mind like the drone of distant waves.
Brienne leaned back and splayed her fingers, extending her reach ilm by ilm up their inseams, as the dull chant of their conversation and the oppressive heat of the stale air made her mind slow, sluggish. Brienne retreated, and her gentle tag-along, her constant companion came forth to take her place, granting her a restful repose just as the businessmen’s cocks stirred to life under her hands.
“<...no geisha, but you can’t expect that sort of class on this side of the world,”> one of them finished a longer thought with a derisive little smack of his lips. Suspended somewhere between sleeping and wakefulness, Brienne had just enough awareness to be surprised that she could understand him. Or rather... her companion could. She clung to the front, holding on to consciousness just long enough to try to hear more, but she was slipping quickly away with each moment.
“<Fuck that, I’d rather have my dick sucked than drink tea. Maybe Eorzeans have the right about some things.>” Brienne’s companion puppeted her body, compelling her to palm Akata’s dick through his pants and slide her thumb over the familiar shape. She didn’t resist--didn’t even want to resist--it was almost comforting. This was something she knew how to do.
Hirota was slower on the draw, but the drugs were almost as compelling to them as her lover was to her, and soon he stiffened in her hand even though he hadn’t taken his eyes away from his drink. “Mmh,” he grunted. “<Fine, but I want her cunt. Seniority holds...>”
The brief grasp she had on their language faded as she lost her sense of hearing, and her vision started to bloom white and black--it wouldn’t be far behind, and soon she’d have nothing at all. All that remained was pure sensation. Brienne felt her lips move, but she didn’t know what she was saying. She felt herself being lifted from the seat by a pair of hands at her waist. The hot leather clung to her thighs until the last moment, not wanting to release its hold on her, but Akata was insistent. Another pair of hands pawed at her skirt, but even that was fading.
She didn’t feel Hirota wedge his spiteful cock into her, which was a shame. Brienne wanted to know if he was as unpleasant of a fuck as he was a negotiator, but her companion denied her this, pushing her further down... down into nothingness. A deep sense of unfairness bubbled weakly in her core, as the last thing she felt was Akata’s thumb wedging between her lips, pulling her mouth open. She’d never been with two men at once before, and there was no good reason why her companion should have all the fun. Maybe this was punishment, a forced abstinence in the face of naked indulgence. Maybe he was still testing her.
Then... there was nothing. Brienne slept until the following morning, while someone else gleefully finished her shift, piloting her body, telling her jokes, sucking dick with every onze of her skill and an extra twist of mischief. In truth, her companion was a better lay than she was. Akata and Hirota couldn’t sign Bremwyda’s papers fast enough when she finally returned to find Brienne cleaning sweat and cum out of the leather couch.
The unsettling whispers that Hirota heard on the wind for the remainder of the week were definitely a coincidence, an artifact of his distaste for loud, unwashed Eorzeans and nothing more.
The kitchen in the back of the tea house was often minimally stocked, mostly containing personal pantries to feed the shrine maidens who worked upstairs, but there was a small store of essentials for the snacks on the tea house’s menu. One popular item was the meat baozi, a steamed dumpling usually filled with spiced pork, but this week they had a fresh supply of tender beef that Brienne had been tasked with preparing for the fillings.
She hummed an artless tune while she slid her knife through the meat, cutting a single large loin into smaller, workable pieces. Her knifework had the deftness of a woman who grew up having to prepare everything by hand, the blade sliding through the thick, red beef as though it was as soft as butter. She lined up little cubes of meat along the edge of the counter, where they awaited being tossed with dry spices and placed over the fire to sear.
The work was automatic, and Brienne’s mind drifted while her hands continued to slice, turn, and slice again, repeating the same rote tasks as she whittled her way down the loin. Her simple tune trailed off and eventually slowed to a stop as she mentally disengaged from her work, and the tips of her fingers started to go numb as they dug into the cold meat, barely able to feel its fibrous, almost slimy texture. She stared down at a blurry redness, eyes blank and distant, while her body worked of its own accord. Gradually and without properly realizing what was happening, the entity that knew herself as Brienne drifted away, letting someone else take over and drive her body while she retreated to a comfortably oblivious respite from the nausea that had been plaguing her all morning.
Put it in your mouth.
Wait... what? That wasn’t right. Brienne rushed back in to take control of herself, her vision growing clear and focused again. She forced her hands to pause, mid-cut, while she assessed this intrusive thought.
Eat it raw. You’ll feel better.
The thoughts originated from somewhere else, someplace completely alien to her, but this wasn’t like the compulsion to stab herself that she’d had weeks ago while she was painting. The choice to act on it was hers alone.
Her eyes flicked back and forth, as if expecting to see someone standing with her. “Are you sure?” she whispered on a low breath in the silent kitchen, but no response came to her. She was alone again, and currently unable to retreat from a body that wanted to do nothing but betray her with a sour stomach and tingling joints. The pit of nausea at the back of her throat throbbed with an insistent immediacy, forcing her to act on something. This wasn’t going to happen automatically--she had to make a choice.
She wanted to do very few things less than what was being asked of her, but Brienne steeled her resolve and barged forward through her disgust all the same, pinching a cube of raw beef with two fingers and cramming it into her mouth before she had time to change her mind. She tried not to let it touch her tongue while she chewed, but the bloody, almost metallic flavor filled her mouth and nose all the same. Her body threatened to gag, to force everything in the other direction, but she gripped the edge of the counter like a vice, squeezed her eyes closed, and swallowed as hard as she could. The lump of cold fiber pushed past the pit of nausea and... miraculously... flushed it away like it had never been there at all.
Even still, she held her body tightly in place for a long moment, worried that the wave of nausea would return with force the moment she let her guard down.
Time passed... and nothing happened. For now, she was free and fully in control of herself.
After what felt like a long while, she opened her eyes and glanced around the empty kitchen, certain that someone must have come by and seen her acting strangely, but she was truly alone. A sigh of relief blew through her, and Brienne wiped her hands off on the front of her apron, physically pushing away the grime of whatever had just happened to her. There was so much work left to be done before the tea house opened, and this meat wasn’t going to cook itself.
Her knife erected burnt sienna cliffs on the canvas with each sharp twist of paint, building them up into steep formations that may or may not resemble the real thing. Brienne closed her eyes and tried to remember the paintings hanging in Raubahn's gallery--the stoic buttes and expansive mesas with their green plateaus--trying to assemble false memories of places she'd never been.
When she opened her eyes, she saw all the flaws created by gaps in her knowledge, places where she didn't know what to paint so she filled it with guesses and impressionistic smears. Were these rocks truly this color, or had that been a stylistic choice by the original painter? Did animals live here? Plants? She didn't know, so she filled it with her assumptions, adding the sin of bias on top of the sin of mimicry.
She worked like this for hours in the silence of her room, the quiet unbroken for so long that she startled out of her reverie when he finally spoke, sending a stray smear of red down the canvas. "When did you stop caring for my opinion?" he asked from somewhere behind her, but she didn't turn around to look at him.
Brienne pulled a deep breath and smoothed out her smock, picking the knife back up and trying again. She turned the butte into a spire, scraping paint up and up the canvas, surpassing the horizon, towering over everything else. "I still care. I've always cared."
"You don't." His voice was hollow, distant.
It would be so easy to reassure him, to look him in the eye and show him her devotion, but Brienne was so focused right now. Couldn't he see that this was a bad time to talk? She almost had this painting under control, she was on the verge of fixing it, did he not even care? The frustration guided her hand, adding frenzied little whips to her strokes that turned the orange desert outcropping into a collection of shards.
"Look at me," he pleaded.
No, this was too important. She took the very edge of her knife and dipped it in a saffron yellow, adding manic gleams of sunlight onto the sharp corners of the cliff peaks. The movements were practiced, automatic. The vision had come back, and everything felt as clear as it had when she stood in the Gladiator's guild and stared up at the painting of the Fringes for hours, committing it to memory.
Suddenly, in the middle of adding a dab of sunshine to the towering spire, her hand stilled against her will. The flick of her wrist slowed as a petrifying sensation took over her hand, trailing up her arm to the elbow. To Brienne's horror, her fingers tightened themselves around the grip of the knife, the blade of which was still coated with cheerful yellow. A subtle, compelling tug took over her mind, an overwhelming urge to plunge the knife into her other palm, so strong that she could already feel the blade sinking into her hand, could already see her red blood dripping down the silver handle and toward the floor.
Her whole body shook with the effort to contain this harrowing compulsion. She felt locked in battle with her own body for hours, but in truth only a few moments had passed this way until, without warning, the compulsion left as quickly as it had came.
The knife clattered to the ground, sending droplets of paint across the wooden floorboards, and all Brienne could do was hold very still and stare at it like a snake that might bite her if she moved. She covered her mouth, heaving sobs of terror that gradually settled into an unbelieving disquiet, until Brienne felt confident that she had full control of herself again.
When she finally cautioned a glance behind her, he was nowhere to be seen.
She paints a portrait from a memory that isn’t hers.
A careful twist of the knife leaves a wet smear of earthy red on the canvas, textured in thick waves, a cascade of burnt sienna hair. When it dries, it will turn opaque like curled petals of stale, crusted-over cake frosting.
Brienne paints the eyes from life, studying her own reflection in the sunlit window next to her bed. Her eyes are just barely seen over the top of the easel, shining wide and vibrant green, mirrored once in the pane, and again on the canvas.
He’s in the window pane too, hovering just behind her and peering over her right shoulder at the portrait. Close enough to touch, if not for the ever-present chasm between them.
“The cheekbones are yours too, although the chin is... hm. More pointy.”
She looks away from him to squint at herself, shifting her focus from the swaying leaves of the Twelveswood in the distance to the hovering ghost of her face where the sunlight catches her cheek. It’s a neat trick, this double vision, this seeing ahead and behind with the same view.
Her chin, but more pointy. Brienne puts down the knife and grabs a brush, painting with a pale yellow with hints of rose in smooth strokes. “This doesn’t look that much like me,” she says with a hint of withering doubt, glancing from the portrait to the window and back again.
“It isn’t supposed to. Although perhaps if you dyed your hair...” His voice is thick with a wistful longing that sits heavily in the quiet room, pregnant with intent.
Goosebumps prickle at the collar of her dress, anticipating the brush of a lover’s hand at the nape of her neck that never comes.
