OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️

016 || Midnight With You

CHAPTER SIXTEEN -          Midnight With You ..

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          "Your eyes look lost," Lucy Gray shattered with disturbing amount of incivility Coriolanus' confidence that at the very least, though he could not escape his weakness from corrupting everything within him, he had not allowed it to show on his face throughout the entirety of interviews that Saturday afternoon had engaged the Mentors and their Tributes into.

"I'm just tired," he defended himself through gritted teeth, before his sense could interfere and remind him that excuses only bring verisimilitude to the accusation they hope to dilute. Without going as far as to phantom what he could have possibly done to Lucy Gray for her brutal lack of manners, he was quick to assume that had he not needed her to have a chance at winning his scholarship, he would have most definitely done something. After all, he had come backstage to congratulate her for the performance which, even though he couldn't pay attention to thanks to drowning in thoughts of Daphne, must have been a blast given everyone else's ovations and applause; to meet someone's kindness with such an insolent comment was unbecoming, even for a District girl like her.

Perhaps he would have held more of a grudge over this single moment, giving it a central portion of his focus on his way back home, had his lips not burned so relentlessly with the ghost of Daphne's touch upon them.

With even less of an audience than he had during the interview, he could even swear the cherry scent of Daphne's lipstick was haunting him too, hand in hand with how his mother's roses did, only instead of calming him, it reminded him of her room, of her blackboard, of her sighs and their kiss — making him agitated to the point that every single garment on him was seemingly conspiring to suffocate him and have him drop dead on the street.

Any more of this and he would lose his mind, Coriolanus had no doubt about it.

They haven't talked about their kiss after they left her room last night. They haven't shared a single word about it after dessert, and not even before they parted ways either. Given how he was left missing her for the whole of that day too, Coriolanus reckoned the passion both of them had put into that moment of ardor was bound to be left forgotten and never spoken of again.

I lost her, didn't I? He had asked himself so often his thoughts begun conjuring up answers with an exponentially growing degree of certainty.

After all, had she felt the way he did, she wouldn't have put this distance between them to begin with.

Once he reached his home, he knew there was only one thing he desired and it was definitely not a conversation with either his cousin or his grandma. As soon as he was in the parlor, he dismissed them both with a lie, albeit by the time he reached his room and dropped his bag and jacket on a chair, he couldn't even remember if he had told them he had important homework to do or that he wished to sleep. All he knew was that, whatever merciful lie he conjured up to avoid admitting to a torturous heartbreak, it had worked: ever since he laid back in his bed, vest discarded and first buttons of his shirt undone, his door hasn't budged.

It wasn't part of his plan to sleep, though after how little he had rested the past nights, his wounds were not the only part of his body begging him for rest. In fact, sleep had swept him unprepared, while he was still sniffing from his mother's powdery, hoping in vain to replace the ghost scent of cherry from his nose that perpetually refreshed in his mind questions without answers such as the innocent wonder, "Where are you, Daphne?"