It hits me, like a bough breaking from above and crashing down on me.
I’m too exposed.
A burn itches at my cheeks. The flush spreads all over my crimson face, and I yank up the underpants.
I shield myself from his startled glare.
His lashes flutter over eyes the hue of iceberg lettuce. So pale, so icy, almost white. Then he turns his cheek to me, a muscle stroked across his face.
I shift for the clothes—and I make quick work of dressing.
My gaze burns from under my lashes, following the warrior as he resumes his perimeter walk.
He doesn’t look at me, but that faint frown of his sticks to his brow, fading then returning, fading then returning.
I wrangle on the tights like his gaze could return any moment. Then I’m pulling on the cami, flailing my way into the sweater, shimmying on the sweatpants—and finally, the thick woollen socks that slip snug on my feet.
I could melt into the warmth and fleece of it all, the gliding caress of the fresh material on my clean skin, the oil that either heats my skin or combats the cold. My boots are still not best for snow, or any sort of ice or sleet, but they are all I have, so I pull them on.
I’m fastening the laces when the warrior’s bootsteps turn at my left, and I twist around to watch him advance on me.
He swipes for the earth—and steals the tiny glass phial into his grip. “Stand.”
I do.
It’s slow work, and when all my weight shifts onto my crouched legs, I take a pause just to breathe through the aches.
Before my spine is even upright, he’s on me, impatient, and his hand has fisted onto the sleeve of the sweater.
I stumble into him, just as he yanks down the sweater’s shoulder.
The return of the cold air is a nip at the raw flesh, a cold burn that isn’t unlike the warrior’s stare. I couldn’t risk applying the oil too close to the wound, just didn’t seem safe.
Regretting that now.
And he’s in no rush, just considering my wound, cold as ever.
My glower aims up at him for too long.
His face is chiselled stone, a pallor flickering warmth under the siege of torchlight, and a stroked muscle along his jaw, all tension in the massive inconvenience I am to him.
Those long lashes cast shadows down his face and darken the frost of his eyes—that are back to that pale green, that iceberg lettuce.
He studies the moss packed onto my shoulder wound (courtesy of your knife, fucker) and the bruising all around. But his gaze, his attention, snags on the sickly varnish down the centre of the moss—like a damp layer, a congealment.
The word he utters is so soft, so quiet, I hardly hear him—
“Weak.”
Softly growled, muttered, and not to me. He didn’t speak directly to me, more of a thought uttered aloud.
But I did hear it.
And since it was his fucking knife that did this, his throw that did this, and he’s responsible for the constant tremble of my body using everything it has to just stay standing, he can fuck a cactus.
‘Weak.’
My mouth turns down at the corners.
