#tethray

Not the way that she crashes into your hive, filling the air with her loud voice bouncing from bookshelf to bookshelf so that even the timeless tomes can't absorb the sound. The phrase "like she owns the place" is first to come to mind, though the bitter cliche lingers on the back of your tongue like a bad piece of fruit. And yet, there's a sort of comfort that lingers in the words; watching her swing her pigtails over her shoulders as she's all swinging hips and babbled stories making her way across the room, feet making practiced dances around the books and parchment scattered on the floor lend testament to the familiarity of her body in your personal bubble that's reassuring and desirable. But even still, you hate the phrase, and you'd never let it pass your teeth.

You find yourself in a similar predicament with the way that she curls against you in a light slumber while you read, her fingers long and cascading through your hair with intent to comfort more than seduce. You almost want to call it loving, the motions of her arm against your shoulder and the way her lips curl against her skin to show her utter contentment swapping what minimal body heat you have to offer, but you've never been an optimist. Instead, you let your mind wander from the worlds of your novels instead to the story of her legs, long and cool gray beneath your hesitant fingertips, light enough so as not to wake her, yet never enough to satisfy the quivering digits. Licking your lips and scrambling for your book when she jolts awake as if suddenly realizing she'd drifted into a doze, hoping her skin doesn't share the same shivers as yours as such sensation would be quite a telling mark of your contact.

And yet, most speechless of all, you think, are the moments of silence when you are not doing anything, and she is not doing anything, and for breaths longer than the life of the rocks enduring winter's long storms, you lose your body in the endless teal gaze of her eyes, so freshly colored from their black prepubescence and tugging on your instinctual knowledge that the age for the first pailing is soon, that her body is ready and that there is no troll you could ever imagine sharing such sacred moments of closed doors and sweated skin against bookshelves with the air ringing with soft moans and the telling tintinnabulation of genetic fluid against the metal erotically beneath. Numerous poems already you'd composed on the way her eyelashes catch the brief moonlight in those few weeks the storms pass long enough for her to stay, and numerous more would you need before even breaching the line of her cheekbones, the curve of her jaw, the shimmer of her lips in the quivering night air, the hesitant touches of her hands against yours in wordless moments where you dare to hope that perhaps this isn't as one-sided as it seems, those rare moments of utter femininity when she is nothing more than breath and woman, close enough to kiss and then so achingly distant when the time comes for her to leave, and with little more than a friendly brush of her lips to your cheek, she's gone, nothing more than a cool ghostly hint of her perfume in the air.