i fell in love with a war
Casimir breaths through his racing heart, trying to still his heaving chest and return to his normal still, solid state. His eyes squeeze shut for a moment, willing the memory of that living room away, inhaling the familiar scent of the bar and letting Thorn’s innocuous chatter wash over his ears. When he opens them, face settled back into unimpressed passivity, Thorn is grinning with a decidedly mischievous grin and looking very much like the cat that ate the canary. Either the other man is too kind to mention his brief outburst or is too excited for what he’s about to do to say it, and either way, Casimir exhales a brief sigh of relief for his lack of acknowledgment.
The bartender can almost see it coming in the graceful curve of Thorn’s hips and the shining gleam in his eye when he walks to the counter. When he reaches it, he splays his ringed hands on Casimir’s beautiful hardwood counter and lifts himself up. He’s seen the cat-like courtesan move with unnatural grace countless times before but this seems almost a purposeful refusal of his lithe body, and he plonks heavily onto the forbidden space of the counter. His grin, naturally, can only be described as shit-eating.
Casimir levels him a deeply unimpressed stare, filled to the brim with flat disdain. Downstairs, at the real bar, he would’ve shoved the smiling courtesan off with a heavy and unflinching movement of his hands, but here? He just gazes at him, letting the stone mask of his face speak for itself.
The bar here, that Thorn’s ass sits upon, is virtually identical to the one downstairs, and it sends Casimir slightly reeling from the uncanniness of it all. The familiarity of the space, without their designated roles, is almost (almost) worse than the haunted living room, like tracking mud through an ancient and well-worn carpet. Like he’s reuniting something reliable.
Slowly, he moves through the room, following Thorn’s trajectory. He doesn’t even look at the bar, won’t even pretend to play the game he’s entertaining the idea of bending the rules that much, but he does ghost towards the unfamiliar stools. His body perches upon one of them, practically right under Thorn, looking up for once at the shorter courtesan. His breath catches in his throat for a single second, the space of a heartbeat; has Thorn’s eyes always been that shade of blue, or had he just never seen it on the other side of the bar?
His hand creeps up from where it rests on his lip, and like a cat with a glass of water on the edge of a table, tries to shove Thorn off the countertop.
The bartender can almost see it coming in the graceful curve of Thorn’s hips and the shining gleam in his eye when he walks to the counter. When he reaches it, he splays his ringed hands on Casimir’s beautiful hardwood counter and lifts himself up. He’s seen the cat-like courtesan move with unnatural grace countless times before but this seems almost a purposeful refusal of his lithe body, and he plonks heavily onto the forbidden space of the counter. His grin, naturally, can only be described as shit-eating.
Casimir levels him a deeply unimpressed stare, filled to the brim with flat disdain. Downstairs, at the real bar, he would’ve shoved the smiling courtesan off with a heavy and unflinching movement of his hands, but here? He just gazes at him, letting the stone mask of his face speak for itself.
The bar here, that Thorn’s ass sits upon, is virtually identical to the one downstairs, and it sends Casimir slightly reeling from the uncanniness of it all. The familiarity of the space, without their designated roles, is almost (almost) worse than the haunted living room, like tracking mud through an ancient and well-worn carpet. Like he’s reuniting something reliable.
Slowly, he moves through the room, following Thorn’s trajectory. He doesn’t even look at the bar, won’t even pretend to play the game he’s entertaining the idea of bending the rules that much, but he does ghost towards the unfamiliar stools. His body perches upon one of them, practically right under Thorn, looking up for once at the shorter courtesan. His breath catches in his throat for a single second, the space of a heartbeat; has Thorn’s eyes always been that shade of blue, or had he just never seen it on the other side of the bar?
His hand creeps up from where it rests on his lip, and like a cat with a glass of water on the edge of a table, tries to shove Thorn off the countertop.
Casimir
and nobody told me it ended
