Meadow

Her squint wasn’t lost on him- on the contrary, he was waiting for it, delighted to receive it, self-satisfied that he’d earned it. Her laugh much the same. He threw his mane proudly back in a red ripple, his body even at its most relaxed lined at its edges with eager tension. No one knew better than Ingrid herself how difficult it was to crack her shield enough to earn a smile, so she could hardly fault him for being a little smug.

“Do you intend to come calling if I have?” It lacked the irritation or warning he was used to from her- or, rather, the warning was not one of defensiveness but confidence, perhaps- for his sake and not her own. His frost-stippled mouth curled into a Cheshire grin. “And risk the ire of your chosen family?” He paused, summoning a suitably aghast pearl-clutching look at the thought- one that lasted all of a heartbeat before his red lashes fluttered predatorily low over his glistening black eyes. “…Naturally.”

Her next admission came with a sweeping glance, as if looking for eavesdroppers- not so much as if to avoid them as, he thought, to make sure that if they existed, they heard what she said next, and his grin was toothy in response. A fine, sharp blade- not that she needed one. Ingrid was the sort who could jam a dull table knife in at just the right angle to reach your heart, he expected. Her scathing observation slid a long, breathy laugh out of him, airy with delight.

“There are many souls here, but they do not belong together. None of their stories match each other.”

“Yes,” he agreed, gleeful in opposition to her scorn. “Isn’t it delicious?” Suddenly brimming with eager energy, he shifted restlessly on his lean legs, his gory body rippling and churning like a bloody tide. “Isn’t there something breathtakingly lovely about the way all their preconceptions and sheltered upbringings grind up against each other? All those jagged edges and soft underbellies they didn’t know they had suddenly brought so very unavoidably to their attention by the teeth of someone else’s biases or the tender bleeding of someone else’s weaknesses…” His eyes were bright and fixed on her deceptively soft face, but they were seeing a different Ingrid from the one who stood before him now. “The sensation of being honed and refined… Or broken to pieces by the friction.” His grin was almost wistful and a little too wide.

“It is a rare pleasure to get to witness the nakedness of that- what a treat, to have it everywhere you look here.”

Shaking himself back to the present- to the Ingrid of the present, watching him with her sharp golden eyes- he licked the manic edge from his smile with a purposeful tongue. “Ohh, I’ve coveted many things in my life. Bound myself to many of them- I’m rather sentimental that way,” he confided to her jovially in his echoing carnyx of a voice. “But perhaps not in the way you’re asking. I keep them here, with me, and in this way nothing I cherish dies. Every summer in a strange new place, and lover whose exquisitely unknown body I’ve mapped, and everyone who’s ground down my jagged biases, or been cut on the refined edges of my experience- these things and times and people have largely passed beyond my reach now, but they remain safe in the harbour of my memories.” His smile lengthened, unusually sincere and at the same time crooked with a heartfelt challenge. “I did not find any of them by belonging. But then, belonging has never been a goal of mine.” This tapered off, not quite a question, not quite advice, simply a keen-edged motivation nudged across the table to see what her own honed considerations would do with it.