get my car door, isn't that sweet? then pull me to the backseat
The pull is nothing like Flora expects, which is rude, because a girl should really get some sort of instruction manual after being kissed into demigodhood by Safrin and then immediately stress-tested by her husband.
One second she’s downstairs bracing herself for whatever ridiculous thing Kaisel is about to try, and the next there’s a tug through her so strange and sharp that her breath catches halfway up her throat. It doesn’t feel like teleporting, not exactly, not like being moved by the hand so much as being hooked behind the ribs by a thread of need and drawn through the world before she has time to decide whether or not she wants to go. The glass-walled room vanishes, the shrine and candles and jasmine dissolving into a blink of starlit dark, and then suddenly she’s upstairs in their bedroom, standing in front of her husband with the dizzying certainty that she’s been called and therefore has arrived.
"Kai—" Flora begins, obviously about to say something about the fact that he is mostly naked and holding up shirts like this is somehow an emergency, except the words snag. Her brows knit together as she blinks at him, because beneath the instinct to sass him, beneath the very real urge to snatch a pillow from the bed and launch it at his head, there’s something else winding itself around her will. Not tight, not painful, but undeniable, a strange binding that presses against her from every side with the shape of the request he’d made. Help. Answer. Do what she was called to do. Somewhere in the back of her mind, six seconds begins counting down like something tangible, bright little grains of time slipping through a divine hourglass, and Flora’s mouth drops open with a dazed, startled little laugh that almost doesn’t make it out.
"The purple one!" she blurts, pointing at the shirt. "It goes better with your ey—" Then she’s gone. The bedroom snaps away, and Flora is suddenly back downstairs, her breath landing hard in her chest as if it had been waiting there for her to return. For half a second she just stares at the empty air in front of her, aqua eyes wide and then she breaks into motion with a burst of breathless laughter, already dashing for the stairs with her curls bouncing wildly loose around her face. "BABE, THAT WAS SO WEIRD!"
One second she’s downstairs bracing herself for whatever ridiculous thing Kaisel is about to try, and the next there’s a tug through her so strange and sharp that her breath catches halfway up her throat. It doesn’t feel like teleporting, not exactly, not like being moved by the hand so much as being hooked behind the ribs by a thread of need and drawn through the world before she has time to decide whether or not she wants to go. The glass-walled room vanishes, the shrine and candles and jasmine dissolving into a blink of starlit dark, and then suddenly she’s upstairs in their bedroom, standing in front of her husband with the dizzying certainty that she’s been called and therefore has arrived.
"Kai—" Flora begins, obviously about to say something about the fact that he is mostly naked and holding up shirts like this is somehow an emergency, except the words snag. Her brows knit together as she blinks at him, because beneath the instinct to sass him, beneath the very real urge to snatch a pillow from the bed and launch it at his head, there’s something else winding itself around her will. Not tight, not painful, but undeniable, a strange binding that presses against her from every side with the shape of the request he’d made. Help. Answer. Do what she was called to do. Somewhere in the back of her mind, six seconds begins counting down like something tangible, bright little grains of time slipping through a divine hourglass, and Flora’s mouth drops open with a dazed, startled little laugh that almost doesn’t make it out.
"The purple one!" she blurts, pointing at the shirt. "It goes better with your ey—" Then she’s gone. The bedroom snaps away, and Flora is suddenly back downstairs, her breath landing hard in her chest as if it had been waiting there for her to return. For half a second she just stares at the empty air in front of her, aqua eyes wide and then she breaks into motion with a burst of breathless laughter, already dashing for the stairs with her curls bouncing wildly loose around her face. "BABE, THAT WAS SO WEIRD!"
no one's ever had me, not like you
