Flora
Flora’s smile is quick and sunlit, curling sharp at the edges. "My treatment of you made you a good deal more compliant," she murmurs, the words wrapped in sugar but laced with memory.
When Jack agrees to come aboard, she bites at the inside of her cheek, not to hide the smile so much as tame it. There’s no masking anything from him—not when the garden of her mind is already gilding itself in molten gold, paths unfurling like welcome mats through an arch of blooms—but she still makes the faintest show of restraint. It’s instinct, maybe, to keep her cards close even when she’s laying the deck out for him to see.
She turns toward the SugarTide, the pier’s boards hollow under her sandals, the wind teasing strands of hair loose to trail against her neck. Every step feels buoyed by a quiet current running under her skin, adrenaline and something lighter, quicker, flitting in her chest like a school of startled fish. The woods had been hazed with liquor, their edges blurred by laughter and the intoxicating allure of just how easy things could be between them when they let it; this is sharper, more deliberate. Not a thing to poke at for meaning—not when heat is already creeping across the bridge of her nose and sliding lower, gathering heavy and warm in her belly.
The stairs to the cabin pass in a heartbeat, the shape of what she intends to do already firm in her mind before her foot even touches the first step. And the moment his boots cross the threshold, she’s there, fingers curling into the lapels of his coat, tugging him down to her. Rising onto her toes, her mouth finds his in a kiss that tastes of salt air and the kind of impatience that skips right over conversation. If his hands slip beneath the loose knit of her sweater, they’ll find no rigging to check at all—just skin, warm from the sun and waiting for his touch.
When Jack agrees to come aboard, she bites at the inside of her cheek, not to hide the smile so much as tame it. There’s no masking anything from him—not when the garden of her mind is already gilding itself in molten gold, paths unfurling like welcome mats through an arch of blooms—but she still makes the faintest show of restraint. It’s instinct, maybe, to keep her cards close even when she’s laying the deck out for him to see.
She turns toward the SugarTide, the pier’s boards hollow under her sandals, the wind teasing strands of hair loose to trail against her neck. Every step feels buoyed by a quiet current running under her skin, adrenaline and something lighter, quicker, flitting in her chest like a school of startled fish. The woods had been hazed with liquor, their edges blurred by laughter and the intoxicating allure of just how easy things could be between them when they let it; this is sharper, more deliberate. Not a thing to poke at for meaning—not when heat is already creeping across the bridge of her nose and sliding lower, gathering heavy and warm in her belly.
The stairs to the cabin pass in a heartbeat, the shape of what she intends to do already firm in her mind before her foot even touches the first step. And the moment his boots cross the threshold, she’s there, fingers curling into the lapels of his coat, tugging him down to her. Rising onto her toes, her mouth finds his in a kiss that tastes of salt air and the kind of impatience that skips right over conversation. If his hands slip beneath the loose knit of her sweater, they’ll find no rigging to check at all—just skin, warm from the sun and waiting for his touch.
I trace the evidence, make it make some sense
why the wound is still bleedin'
why the wound is still bleedin'
Code stolen from Queen Sky
