flora
For a moment, it all lingers—the warmth between them, the hush of the room still draped in gold, the way her breath matches the rise and fall of his chest as if they’re part of the same tide. Everything is soft. Still. Suspended in that trembling hush just before the shatter. And then he says it: Even if we can’t have this.
It’s not a maybe. It’s a quiet goodbye dressed in hopeful tones, a gentle untethering masked as reassurance. Flora doesn’t flinch, but she feels it deep in the marrow of bones, a splintering note struck somewhere just beneath the ribs. She feels the moment everything shifts back into place and yet not quite the same, like a vase glued back together too quickly, lines invisible only if you don’t know where to look, except that she does, and now those lines suddenly feel like the sort of thing that were she to cross them again, someone would get hurt.
So, she smiles.
Not because she wants to lie—never with him—but because if she doesn't, if she lets the truth show on her face, she’s afraid of the position it'll put him in. So when his thumb brushes beneath her eye, she tilts into it with sunlit affection, her smile gentle and warm and threaded with something bittersweet.
She thinks—only briefly—of leaning in again. Of stealing one last kiss in the golden spill of morning, of dragging even a sliver of the night’s wonder into daylight. But thoughts of Koa and Caly flicker like a candle caught in wind; some things, no matter how beautiful, can’t be carried forward without crushing something else beneath their weight.
So she lets the moment go.
He tosses a splash of humour over the ache like confetti over a funeral pyre, and it makes her stomach clench with affection and grief both. Of course, he would. Of course he’d be the one to try and paint the end in bright colours, to cushion her fall with candy-sweet banter. And gods, does she love him for it, which is why she plays her part too.
Rolling her eyes with all the exaggerated flair she can summon, she exhales a sigh and pushes herself up, letting her body unspool from the tangle of sheets and skin like the act itself doesn’t feel like peeling herself away from something sacred. She twists away with purpose, not because she wants distance but because it’s the only way she’ll keep her footing. The shirt she pulls over her head still smells faintly like salt and sea and him, and she fluffs out her curls with the kind of showy flourish that belongs to someone perfectly fine and unbothered.
Over her shoulder, without looking, she calls, "The day you learn to spell desperate measures is the day I start worrying, Assborn. Now get dressed—" her voice lilts, just a little too bright "—I’m craving fish tacos for breakfast."
~FIN
It’s not a maybe. It’s a quiet goodbye dressed in hopeful tones, a gentle untethering masked as reassurance. Flora doesn’t flinch, but she feels it deep in the marrow of bones, a splintering note struck somewhere just beneath the ribs. She feels the moment everything shifts back into place and yet not quite the same, like a vase glued back together too quickly, lines invisible only if you don’t know where to look, except that she does, and now those lines suddenly feel like the sort of thing that were she to cross them again, someone would get hurt.
So, she smiles.
Not because she wants to lie—never with him—but because if she doesn't, if she lets the truth show on her face, she’s afraid of the position it'll put him in. So when his thumb brushes beneath her eye, she tilts into it with sunlit affection, her smile gentle and warm and threaded with something bittersweet.
She thinks—only briefly—of leaning in again. Of stealing one last kiss in the golden spill of morning, of dragging even a sliver of the night’s wonder into daylight. But thoughts of Koa and Caly flicker like a candle caught in wind; some things, no matter how beautiful, can’t be carried forward without crushing something else beneath their weight.
So she lets the moment go.
He tosses a splash of humour over the ache like confetti over a funeral pyre, and it makes her stomach clench with affection and grief both. Of course, he would. Of course he’d be the one to try and paint the end in bright colours, to cushion her fall with candy-sweet banter. And gods, does she love him for it, which is why she plays her part too.
Rolling her eyes with all the exaggerated flair she can summon, she exhales a sigh and pushes herself up, letting her body unspool from the tangle of sheets and skin like the act itself doesn’t feel like peeling herself away from something sacred. She twists away with purpose, not because she wants distance but because it’s the only way she’ll keep her footing. The shirt she pulls over her head still smells faintly like salt and sea and him, and she fluffs out her curls with the kind of showy flourish that belongs to someone perfectly fine and unbothered.
Over her shoulder, without looking, she calls, "The day you learn to spell desperate measures is the day I start worrying, Assborn. Now get dressed—" her voice lilts, just a little too bright "—I’m craving fish tacos for breakfast."
~FIN
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you
And now I'm covered in you
