a cold shoulder at closin' time
No response rises immediately, not because Colt's explanation lacks sense but because the memory she’s brushing up against sends Vesper's thoughts spiralling in a direction he has no interest in revisiting. The night she’d channelled him—used him, really, in the exact way she’d wanted, drawing him down around her until every nerve in her body had been tuned to his shadowed pulse—collides far too cleanly with the image of her mouth on Thalassa’s, her hands in the wrong goddamn places, her breath spilling hot against someone he wanted nothing to do with. The overlap is jagged, overlapping in ways that leave the details of her reasoning remarkably easy to slide past without comment, so he lets them pass untouched.
It’s her name that breaks him out of the quiet. Thalassa. She says it without hesitation, without the caution a wiser woman might have taken, and it pulls at something in him with a sharp, involuntary twitch of his upper lip. His chin lifts as though he might find a calmer answer in the shifting canopy overhead, a momentary tilt of his face toward leaves and light as he breathes through the spike of irritation. It lasts only as long as it takes for him to trust himself not to snap.
When he looks back down at her, the humour that escapes him is a single, low huff edged with disbelief and something meaner beneath it. "You know what?" he says, smooth as cut glass. "You’re right." The words hang with a weight that’s anything but agreement. His hands lift in a languid silly me gesture, palms open as though conceding the floor to her logic, even as his expression betrays not an ounce of conceding anything.
"Why would I be upset," he continues, voice gaining momentum, the sarcasm settling into every curve of the drawl, "that after I left and told you to come visit, you decided to channel me just to get yourself off, then showed up exactly where anyone with a shred of sense would assume I’d be, and shoved your tongue down the throat of the one person in Caido you knew I had history with." He doesn’t pause or soften. "Someone you also channelled me to attack, if you’re keepin’ track." His hands drop back to his sides as he shakes his head once, trying and very nearly failing to keep the frustration from visibly slicing through the composure he’s fighting to maintain.
It’s her name that breaks him out of the quiet. Thalassa. She says it without hesitation, without the caution a wiser woman might have taken, and it pulls at something in him with a sharp, involuntary twitch of his upper lip. His chin lifts as though he might find a calmer answer in the shifting canopy overhead, a momentary tilt of his face toward leaves and light as he breathes through the spike of irritation. It lasts only as long as it takes for him to trust himself not to snap.
When he looks back down at her, the humour that escapes him is a single, low huff edged with disbelief and something meaner beneath it. "You know what?" he says, smooth as cut glass. "You’re right." The words hang with a weight that’s anything but agreement. His hands lift in a languid silly me gesture, palms open as though conceding the floor to her logic, even as his expression betrays not an ounce of conceding anything.
"Why would I be upset," he continues, voice gaining momentum, the sarcasm settling into every curve of the drawl, "that after I left and told you to come visit, you decided to channel me just to get yourself off, then showed up exactly where anyone with a shred of sense would assume I’d be, and shoved your tongue down the throat of the one person in Caido you knew I had history with." He doesn’t pause or soften. "Someone you also channelled me to attack, if you’re keepin’ track." His hands drop back to his sides as he shakes his head once, trying and very nearly failing to keep the frustration from visibly slicing through the composure he’s fighting to maintain.
you were beggin' me to stay 'til the sun rose
