Something With a Prince

Chapter Forty-Six: Destination Society

Tallethea

Dawn cracked open the sky and we reached the main road when it had crested over the mountains, sitting above us like a great beacon.

It's no later than six in the morning, and Lansing loves me.

With soil crunching under our boots, and the way our feet fell to accommodate limps among other injuries, I zoned into the freedom of taking a walk under the sky. Moments at a time I would remember I was still in her forest, but those moments were so deafening and fear-drenched that my first instinct was to ignore them. So, the color of light reflecting from green leaves was my sole focus.

The only interruptions to my admiring scenery were that restlessness the fire had planted in me last night and the instinct to be on my guard. No finery could distract me from the fact we were still in her playpen, just on a larger scale. That at any time she could uproot and crash into us, laughing like it was all a cruel joke. Paranoia. I had seen it in thousands of soldiers, in the King, in Arlyn...I never thought it would get me too. But it had, and it had sunk its claws deep into both Lansing and I.

We are alive and Lansing loves me.

Those thoughts seem to pop in at intervals. Like a chilly draft I cannot seem to find, they float into the room of my brain and twist up the dust on the floor. Each time, my stomach drops then flutters, then there is this horrible weight that piles on top of me. I find that the room in my mind opens to hundreds of corridors, all dark and twisted up...and sometimes, when standing in my mind, a pair of hands stretch out like shadows and grip my ankles, then they rip me down those corridors.

Lansing feels like those hands when I look at him.

But, other times, I feel safe and in the swell of the darkness it is no longer hands, but arms, wrapping around my shoulders and telling me it's okay.

He was those arms as well.

Since the fire, I had been debating whether to tell him all of this. If I should inform him of the things I had said to Saorla's shifter in the cellar when I thought it was the prince holding me and not that creature. But then I stop myself, rather fear does, and I wonder how I could have been fooled? How could I have been so blind to not see that there was no way Lansing would have taken the risk to see me under any circumstances? Yet, when I visited him, I knew that there was a chance my actions were being watched and still I put him in danger. Those decisions were something Lansing would never do.

I am unforgivable. And Lansing loves me.

Most of my life I had associated him with my pain. Not only associated him with it but blamed him as the sole cause, and now there is a hole where answers used to be. My ideas of life, of people, and of myself were splitting apart like logs on a fire. And here I am, now, only thinking of myself. Having been a selfish being all my life... What in the world could convince him that I was not to blame?

Well, there was a decision that changed all this, and it was the one I had made when Saorla towered above him. It was made again when he pulled me from the river and once more when he watched me over the fire like I was the source of its flame. No longer would Lansing be associated with my pain. My actions toward him will never be spurred out of unchecked anger or even love...because I can no longer separate what those mean. Until I could choose to feel for him outside of my past, deserve the love he gave and be worthy to love him in return, then I would be alone. Otherwise, I was just damming him to trauma that wasn't his to carry. Tethering him, again, to a wall and running those blades of glass meant for me through his back.

There was no saying how complicated things were about to get, especially after kissing him the way I did. The way he kissed me. Standing on its own, that was the single most deadly weapon in my memory.