The stories she imagined were things that only her creative side and the misunderstood desire combined could make up. Her eyes took in the face of the other girl, roaming as they had when she was behind the safety of her easel and looked at her slender neck, the locks of neatly tamed mane resting on her shoulders, a few longer and almost falling to the portion of her chest that rose and rounded and that created the soft valley of brown fur that her hand was held right above. Gaze was set forcefully to the necklace, and then drifted to the side wondering as eyes roamed if Cambria noticed that she could not keep her sight uncontrolled. Softy voice brought them back to her face, and Mati looked focused and almost as if she had just been scolded for wondering to where she knew she shouldn’t have been.
Her father? Mati smiled once more, and let the charm go. Her immediate and irrational worry had made her reluctant to let it fall from her grasp. She set it gently against the soft pillow of fur that was its home, inadvertently touching the silk like chocolate as she did so. At the contact Mati withdrew her hand faster then she had intended to, not wanting to make Cambria shy away from the small, yet momentous in Mati’s mind, touch.
“That was really nice of him.” She added in her exhale, almost mindlessly. The tension that had been laced between them seemed to be knotted in every joint, every inch of skin covering the two females. Before when such a thing had happened she had been stoned, lost as her mind wander to another place and recognizing none of the energy that ran between she and the coyote until it had been almost too late.
Mati still held her reeling mind back, the panic, and the anxiety fatigued but ready to rebound the moment the intoxication of Cambria moved far enough away. What she wanted could not be explained, and something that she had never wanted before. Never had she felt so much relief by knowing what kind of gift someone had been given. It had never mattered before, but now she couldn’t have managed to continue to breathe if it had been any other way. Each second was delicate, so fragile that Mati could not move, the fear of breaking it overwhelming. She needed to run away, she needed to breathe air that was not laced with her scent. Then maybe her mind would work as it once had. But Mati found that leaving would be as uncomforting as the blindness that she swam through as she stood before her pack mate and friend.
Cambria’s passive nature drew forth a side in Mati that she had not yet known. She had never played the lead in anything moving, and nothing like this at all. But she didn’t know the experience that the other girl held, and didn’t even understand where they stood. Mati felt on the edge, a feeling unlike anything she had ever experienced, and never wanting it to stop and at the same moment wanting it to be over. To return to normal, her lonely studio sketching her desires and needs on paper and mulling over the small loss that she had experienced when Ares had left. Mati could count the hours she and Cambria had spent together on her fingers and she still would believe that if she slipped from her hands now it would bring a disastrous feeling upon her heart. Her breath had quickened at the realization and new feeling, unmoving with her hand lightly clenched and held towards her own heart.
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