Cade's Inbox

[onlyhymns]

[For personal threads, memos, things left in his quarters for him to stumble on, confessions of love, injunctions, jars of bees, and so forth.]

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[onlyhymns]

The silence that stretches between them is agonizing, which only makes the interruption of it all the sweeter. He looks up when she approaches, unsure of how to react, and thus Nari is able to fix his hair and sit with her shoulder touching Cade's without spooking him.
He smiles faintly, to himself, his heart swelling in that same unfamiliar way he felt once before. To be doted on, something he didn't even know he wanted, is so pleasantly welcome.

[nadasharillen]

The sea seems a little bluer, the horizon a little wider, the sun a little warmer on her legs, and Nari finds herself purposefully avoiding a glance at her charcoal mark as she again sets to wordlessly hoping the space they share will somehow move outside immaterial things like work.

The thought makes her chuckle lowly; it’ll be felt through her shoulder more than heard.

[onlyhymns]

It's another long silence that follows, but this one is more companionable. There's still awkwardness-- nothing Cade does is entirely without it-- but he has relaxed, if only slightly. The day is fine and the company asks little of him, which allows him to slip out of his shell a little further.

"I, um," he begins quietly after a time, still looking out at the water, "thank you." He clears his throat. "For. ...this."

[nadasharillen]

Nari spends a fair amount of time in this place. Early afternoons, sunsets, sometimes deeper in the night to watch the stars in the darkness away from the torches that light the more traversed areas of the island. She’d come when the rocks were iced over and she hadn’t cared whether or not she slipped and fell to sink into the dark water.

In the intervening space between their words, she is trying to overwrite those particular visits with this quiet, the early spring, the room Cade takes up in her perception of the space, the light pressure on her shoulder so that she can come back to visit it when he clears his throat quietly to thank her. She nods an acknowledgement, pauses, then says “...thank you for coming.”