I was seated next to the strange blue flame, knees tucked beneath me staring alternately into the blue flame of the fire and out of the mouth of the cave. I judged it to have been about an hour before he finally came strolling back into the cave.
He emerged from the darkness, cloak billowing in the breeze, tendrils of his dark, now damp hair clung to his face. In the absence of rain and the fact that his clothes were dry I concluded that he’d spent his time away bathing and that knowledge brought on a whole new round of thoughts that set my pulse pounding higher. He glanced in my direction but didn’t meet my eyes. “You should sleep, Milady.” He said not unkindly, but detached all the same. His face looked, what was that, anger or shame or…Oh. I knew that look and my good great white shark but I was an idiot. That look was regret.
Of course it was, what had I been thinking?
For a tiny little moment I let myself hope, begin to believe that he reciprocated my feelings or whatever it was going on inside me, even if only a little. An impossible, ridiculous notion. I could see that now, looking at him as he busied himself with random tasks like relocating a silvery bow and a quiver of arrows and taking inventory of the contents of a pack he carried on his saddle.
I wanted to demand that he explain his behavior, make him admit to feelings I knew he couldn’t have for me. Or, at the very least, tell me what he was thinking when he was touching me, looking at me with those impossibly green eyes that were filled with a thousand emotions.
But, I just bit my tongue and didn’t speak a word. To speak my thoughts would be pouring salt into the wound. It would be purposefully foolish. I was a lot of things, but purposefully foolish was not one of them, at least for the most part anyway.
So, I did the as he asked. I lay down to sleep, but when I closed my eyes that golden moment between us played out in my head and I drifted away to it and dreamed of him.