Finally she seems to grasp her position in this interaction. He is far from irritated, though he is desperate for her to give him direction. Say yes, say no - not both to varying degrees and methods of saying so. He is too frank a creature to thrive when lines were not drawn in the sand. At last he finds that spark of shock in her washing a flood of reality past the flames that seem the reason for her constant teasing of him. It is as he had known from the first, not worthy of her and not nearly prepared to let himself to be free with his desires beyond fleeting glimpses.

She shivers and he is not so foolish to think the night cool enough to have brought it out in her. Her shock ebbs, but it is enough to have slammed that mask of stone back into place as if he had never let it slip at all. She is delicate as she repositions herself, but there is no visible change in him - he had strangled that part of himself out of breath the moment she had let the dawning of understanding light on her face. She looks like the children on the battlefields and bartering earth of no-man’s-lands.

"I do not think i am ready for that," he expected nothing else, though he takes an additional step back as she attempts to take an extra forward. He hear’s it when Sakhmet wakes and wants to scream out after her when she speeds away rather than to her lady’s defense, "but is there any harm to partaking in another’s company without any complicating implications?" His eyes look to Aldebaran and the stallion is swift to pursue the lady Atair could do nothing to help. He wants to weep, but his face is as stone and does not even flinch except at the corner of the eyes as he looks back on Eness. He goes rigid when she steps even closer, ears turned back on themselves as she risks bringing the pooling scent of the season with her.

Another step, pain swelling in his eyes in spite of the mask. He wants nothing but to give her what she wanted - but he is incapable and he knows his limits. He could not be uncomplicated for her, could not be so innocuous as she thought him. This was the fear of every stallion unwed in Mira - to find their Soul Sewn and know them to belong to someone else, to realize that their circumstances did not free them to embrace the one who held within them the other half of their soul. There had been some who had enlisted to be rid of the pain, to be so broken and reformed as to forget they had only half - that they were not whole - in the wash of other’s blood.

They often made the best infantry, those who were empty of their other halves.

He looks down, collecting himself back in and stamping down the emptiness of unrequited proposal. It was well within her right to refuse him and he finally reins in the last vestiges of that fire he had foolishly bared to her in his earnestness to have her fear his interest. He is ashamed to have been so barefaced with one that was not his First Wife but he knows now the futility and so he offers that tame smile, “I will not leave you unprotected, lady.”

He steps aside, shrinking back from the invisible line she prods, careful of himself now that he was likely to never fit back into it’s original place of smoke and mirrors and ready denial.“You other protection has gone.”