heart eyes, sweet heart

Flora didn't, doesn't, have so many friends her own age to gossip and gaggle about her long ride off into the slow-milled Alettan sunset, feathered through fingers of Titan's stone, with the bastard prince paramour that, doubtless, so many Aurescan ladies would kill (or at least maim) for.

She has existed, for the past couple of years since school, in a mostly-secluded bubble of mundanity - one shepherded, if ungracefully, through the afternoons of shiftless light by her parents and their disapproval for the dichotomy of characters they believe their daughter to display within and without the home.

The actual event of her declaration, to them, that she will be leaving is not one Flora likes to dwell upon. It's what had folllowed after (and, to some extent, before) that captures her, oh, lifts her up...

Because if Flora had, in fact, had those young-lady friends, she would have been subjected to, if not engaged with, their estimations of Addam as this or that type of man - trustworthy to a point of boredom, or flakey in his fascination, or a deceptive middle-match that was nothing at all like the way he read (as if this wasn't perfectly his prerogative).

Flora can't really speak for any of it. She just knows the Addam she met by chance, and didn't tell anyone about, at the time, because she just had a certain sort of a feeling. And because it would have been depressing, all in all, to take her final days on board - away from home - and stir the rest of the disbanding dormitory into a frenzy over someone she'd likely never see again.

But then she did. Oh, how the girls would have tittered if they knew that it had been down to the faintest touch of an ask, from the mouth of one Mr. Origo to the dean of the boarding school, as to the whereabouts of a young woman matching such-and-such a description, of their most recent graduating class. Flora frets at him about it, later, and he does sheepishly admit that it's quite clear, now, what an abuse of his influence such a trick had been, but, why, Flora, where would we be now, if I hadn't?

Flora grants that Addam hadn't come directly to her residence, or newly-christened (to her) place of work, instead sending a respectful letter at the first, but if she had been otherwise occupied and not at liberty to catch the innkeeper passing out the mail on that day, then her mother would have known all about it in an instant, and then where would we be now, Addam?

Addam declares that he doesn't want to think about it. Flora hates that she loves to agree. But he is, truly, just as the jury of peers would have decreed it: sunshine, unyielding, warm and fervent in each glad embrace; hopelessly in love with her and their own spun story, always nearly moved to tears by the thought of it; staring with soft, glistening eyes into every thrush of her lashes and dimple of her dewy lips.

His hands on her shoulders sap the aches from her neck. His arms about her waist, at night, make an unfamiliar bed into the most divine comfort of all. His cheek against hers draws the rest of the world, unimportant world, into relief.

Around Addam, Flora can be quiet, can be reticent. Can measure her words and count her own maturity.

There are days - oh, there are days - when she doubts every crumb of knowledge she's accrued these last few years, and wonders just when it was that she last came upon something wholly precious and new.

And there are nights where she can breathe, safely, to Addam's rhythm, all set right.