bottom line, we made it out the first time still in love and half alive
The Ark's eyes find Jack as soon as he enters the shop. The smile that curves her mouth is slow and feral, wine-dark lips parting just enough to show the promise of teeth beneath. "You remember yours," she says lightly, a dismissive flick of tone as careless as spray against a hull, as her fingers rise to gather her hair and sweep it over one shoulder, baring the long pale column of her back for him where freckles scatter there like salt dried against deckwood. She glances at him from beneath her lashes, brow lifting in a coy arc. "Why would I need to get out of it quickly?"
There is no blush beneath the question. No anticipation of fumbling urgency or heat made frantic. She understands arousal the way she understands tide—that it comes, that it pulls, that it can drown, that she can control it—but the lived scramble of it, the rush to tear free of fabric in some desperate human haste, is foreign terrain. She knows the effect of her body; she has seen it splinter men like rotted beams, and she wields it like a current, a pressure, a drag, an undertow. But physical urgency is not something her mind yet understands.
As Jack's hands find the laces, she exhales as he begins to draw them through the eyelets, slow at first, testing the line. "Tighter," she purrs, the word rolling low from her throat, not strained but satisfied, like rigging pulled to proper tension at last. She tilts her head slightly toward the garments he gestures to and gives a small shrug that ripples down her bare back. "I do have some like those picked out." Indeed, along the walls and counter and abandoned mannequin limbs are piles already claimed: gleaming leather pants supple as oiled deck planks, satin dressed and shirts cut low and fluid, lace that clings and reveals in equal measure.
There is no blush beneath the question. No anticipation of fumbling urgency or heat made frantic. She understands arousal the way she understands tide—that it comes, that it pulls, that it can drown, that she can control it—but the lived scramble of it, the rush to tear free of fabric in some desperate human haste, is foreign terrain. She knows the effect of her body; she has seen it splinter men like rotted beams, and she wields it like a current, a pressure, a drag, an undertow. But physical urgency is not something her mind yet understands.
As Jack's hands find the laces, she exhales as he begins to draw them through the eyelets, slow at first, testing the line. "Tighter," she purrs, the word rolling low from her throat, not strained but satisfied, like rigging pulled to proper tension at last. She tilts her head slightly toward the garments he gestures to and gives a small shrug that ripples down her bare back. "I do have some like those picked out." Indeed, along the walls and counter and abandoned mannequin limbs are piles already claimed: gleaming leather pants supple as oiled deck planks, satin dressed and shirts cut low and fluid, lace that clings and reveals in equal measure.
we didn't die, but no guarantees this time, but fuck it lets do it again
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
