[Arianna]
The absence of his warmth from her side is almost as shocking as the flash-crash of the storm around them. The rain is already coming in heavier, colder drops as he pulls her to her feet and Arianna crams her feet into her shoes without stooping to un- and then re- tie them. His blazer is a welcome shield against the needling, icy raindrops pelting them as they retreat to the treeline. There is a moment, though, before she follows after him, when her attention is cast out to sea and the riotous wall of dark clouds there, and the purple-bright flashes that dance between them, and they way it almost calls out something inside her; the way she wants to stand on the very edge of the cliff to greet it; as if she has heard the Lorelei and fallen prey to her sonorous, treacherous teachings -- before Silas's hand, or his voice call her sharply back to the immediate danger and she begins to hurry after him.
We have mentioned before, dear reader, that Arianna is fleet-and-sure of foot. Perhaps we boasted a little for effect. Surely she is not as hampered by relative inexperience as the other girls with whom Silas passes his time, but neither is she truly prepared for adventure and danger of this scale or sort. The moors are slick beneath their feet, and unforgiving if either should stumble; the thin blanket of moss and greenery does little to gentle the granite beneath it. They run, and slide a little, and skid through the treeline, and she is just a few moments behind him, ducking under a low slung branch as they push into the undergrowth and thickets of the wood that lines the cliffs. Brambles tear at her stockings, thorns and leaves and twigs get caught up in the nylon and travel on with her, to be picked at and out later. The storm crashes around them again, and Arianna pauses to look back at the magnitude of it as it rolls over the moors. The sky is dark and ominous, where they can still see it between the trees; the daylight is flagging; it is almost overrun by the cloud bank.
On they go, toward the creek, which was already filled to the brim of its boundaries. The going is slower as they weave between the tree trunks and crash through thickets and generally make as quick and steady progress as they are able. When they reach the water line, there is no debate about trying to cross over -- or there would be, but Silas undoubtedly nips that terrible idea in the bud. As overconfident of her abilities as his Stella might be; there is no way she'd make the crossing with the water this fast-moving and high. So it is back to the low stone building of the watcher's keep, and the pathway is thin and hidden; later she will wonder at the ease with which he finds and follows it. She slips, and he catches her, hauling her back to standing and steady. Later he slips and falls even to a knee. She falls again, and her hand collides sharply with stone on landing, sending a spike of pain up through her wrist and into her arm but it doesn't break skin. She is up and following him again quickly, adrenaline over-riding any sense of self-concern. Eventually they slip-climb-crawl-clutch their way into the clearing of the keep.
The building itself is stout and small, with a rounded door and an old iron latch. The thick walls block out most of what is left of the daylight, and the stone floors are slick beneath their muddied feet. To the left of the door is a low workbench and shelving, that wraps the corner and proceeds down the left wall, stopping just short of a wide hearth. The far wall has shelving again, until it runs rightward into the platform bed, nestled into a crook which forms the walls of that sleeping berth. There is a rug before the hearth, and a small table with two round stools pressed against the far wall. Everything is covered with a fine coating of dust; the corners, where the walls meet into the roofline, are decorated with faint cobwebs.
Silas leaves her, then, to go looking for the shed and firewood -- which he will find near enough by. In this time, Arianna makes quick work of searching the shelving for familiar shapes, relying on her hands in the near-dark and the brightness offered by the ever-more frequent flashes of brightness. Outside, the rain is relentless, coming down like a dark curtain. When her fingers happen on the roughly cylindrical, waxy forms of pillar candles, and a small rough edged box of matches nearby, she almost laughs with relief. By the time Silas returns with wood to start the fire, she has made some semblence of dim brightness in the cabin. She is climbed up on a stool and settling the last of the stout pillars unto a high shelf by the bed when he returns; the room is veritably ringed by the overlapping and flickering pools of candlelight.
There is more to do, though, and Silas is so busied with building and stoking their hearth flame that perhaps he doesn't notice Ari slip back out into the storm. She is carrying a bucket she found under the bench and like he knows that there will be firewood nearby, she knows there will be a well. She finds it, and fills the bucket with water even colder than the rain, and has to haul it back to the cabin's mouth with just one arm because the other, struck so in falling, protests the weight of carrying the load.
Together, but separately, they work to secure the practicalities of their mis-adventure. As he hangs the line and slings up the blanket, she fills the iron kettle with well water, and uses the tools beside the fire to hang it from a hook inside the hearth. Soon the cabin arm will be warmed by the crackling fire; soon they too will have hot water to wash with or to steep tea or whatever they may need. Of course she has noticed Silas slipping out of his shirt, his skin colored by firelight, seeming as radiant and warm as it always is to the touch. For the first time, since their flight to safety began, she thinks again about his hands over her skin and the memory flushes her cheeks. Which makes it so terribly hard to focus as he helps her out of his blazer, and then she struggles her way out of her vest.
The crisp white of her dress shirt is already damp where the rain has soaked through his blazer and her vest. The dripping of her hair only hastens its growing transparency, and the tendency of wet fabric to cling to skin and show more than it obscures. Silas is rewarded with the visibility of the faint pink of her underclothes, straps showing clearly through the white shirt now at her shoulders and across her back. Otherwise, she is uncharacteristically bedraggled. There are leaves in her dripping hair, and bits of brambles trapped in her legs. Mud on her knees, and the hem of her skirt. She is less his star and more a dryad, drenched by the rain and kissed by firelight. Or maybe a Sylph which has been dragged through the forest. Surely some creature of air, or water, or darkness.
"I'm okay," she tells him, though in time he'll notice that she favors her left wrist -- and also that is not serious enough to have broken skin; at worst is a sprain or some greenstick fracture, neither of which can be mended with anything but time or magic. And they are both too cold to be okay for long. But truly, the deepest damage done is to the innocence of their friendship, for he is now her first true kiss, and also the first to touch her in so many ways, and her savior from this violent storm, and so it is harder for the way she looks to him in his state of half-dress to be challenging and playful only. "Are you? And, I clearly cede your point about the storm..."
And yet she tries. And to break away from the way that she is watching him, she turns her attention to shoving her feet out of her shoes -- and resting those near the hearth to dry out. And since she is down that far already, she reaches under her skirt to push down the waistband of her tights, shifts to sitting so she can peel them down the length of her legs and away from her. They are discarded, ruined, to rest beside her shoes and Ari rubs her hands up and down her shins a few times to warm them. She marks a few shallow scratches from the brambles and uses a thumb, moistened in her mouth, to wipe the dots of blood away from them. They have already closed over. The skirt and her underclothes alone do not offer her much warmth or protection, but they are better than the clinging damp of the sullied tights.
The bulk of the ready-making activity is done, now. They have expended it all in a scant few minutes. Done. And now there is nothing left but to make merry with one another, for there is still wine and still some food, and little else to do but enjoy each other's company. Which is a newly-strange and electric thing. Outside, the storm rages on, picking up momentum and noise as it crashes through the forest, wind howling down the chimney and raking angry hands across the tiles of the roof and shuddering the door on its hinges and its latch. The last of this draws her attention away from him, and a tightness across her shoulders; it begins to dawn on Ari how close a thing it was for them, this getting caught out on the moors. They will certainly not make it back to the Institute tonight.
[Silas]
"I'm fine, thanks." His trousers are certainly worse for the wear - they're muddy and wet, and there's a tear where he fell and his skin is scraped through (there will be scabby healing, and significant bruising), so that water will be put to good use when it's hot enough - but otherwise Silas is well. "May I look?" He indicates Arianna's wrist, and if allowed does examine it. He's no healer, not yet, but the warmth of him works wonders towards releasing tension in muscles and tendons that could slow healing at best, or worsen the injury at worse. After this examination (and a quick, light kiss to the injury site) she's let go again, and it's from the corner of his eyes that he watches her remove her tights. It's not that he's shy or inexperienced; he's spent time with girls who have done away with any inclination towards that. But this is Arianna, and so a whole different set of behaviors with which Silas isn't entirely certain are required. These are foreign waters in which they find themselves, and they're confusing to navigate, so again he makes himself busy.
Getting out the rest of their food and wine, including the still wrapped (but banged up, given the rush) wrapped parcel within and setting it at the little table with the stools doesn't take nearly long enough, but it's a pretty little scene when it's done - two plates, two forks, two wine tumblers, the little plate of elegant finger foods (if such a phrase isn't redundant), the bottle, the parcel.
The two teenagers in candlelight while the storm rages outside.
All of this takes seconds, and then there's the two of them waiting for water to boil, and they won't be making it back tonight. It's sudden, impulsive, when Silas moves to her side and draws her to one of the stools. "Here, sit." Her shirt is growing more and more translucent, and he's having more and more difficulty not looking. The solution to this appears to be, for now, standing behind her to massage her shoulders. Again, there's that warmth and how well it helps release stress . . . and for several minutes, it seems that may be enough. Right up until he leans in to smell her hair, wet and bedraggled as it may be just now, and one hand ceases its work to pull said hair from her neck, so that he can lean in to kiss it.
The water is near to boiling and the hut is warming nicely, but not so nicely as the spots where he touches with hands, and lips. It calls to mind a few ways to spend the remainder of the afternoon, evening, and night, certainly.
[Arianna]
Of course she lets him examine her wrist; she has let his hands roam over more intimate places than this already today, but that was before the storm crash and before their flight toward the cabin. The warmth of his hands sliding over her skin reminds of the feeling of his warm hands elsewhere, and so it is not just pain which causes her to draw her breath in sharply -- but perhaps it reads as only pain. And yet he is here, shirtless, his shoulders and back already echoing the breadth they will take in manhood, kissed by firelight and so carefully attending to her that Arianna, always headstrong, and always so self-assured and always so ready to go toe-to-toe with him, allows him this tenderness, this inspection, without complaint or bravado.
That is not to say that things are any less electric between them. Perhaps that intensity is what drives him to set out their meal, to play at making this watcher's hut more home-like -- which only, then, again, deepens the tension between them, for if this a home and their keep at that, then they are -- they would -- would they?
Right. Arianna's attention is momentarily for the fire and how it dances. Only for the fire, and how it dances. Specifically not for how the light of it dances off the shapes of the muscles working underneath his skin. Specifically not for the bareness of his shoulders, or arms, or stomach -- the lower most extremity of which is thankfully covered by this trousers. Decorum, in its tattered shreds, persists. For now.
It's impulsive when he draws her to the table, and it is equally impulsive when she takes up their shared wine bottle and does not pour them separate glasses. Instead she works the cork free, careful of her injured wrist, whilst he attends to her shoulders, and while that warmth spreads down along her spine. The wine bottle is kept close, her hand loosely around its neck, an echo of the ease and nonchalance with which she will always handle wine bottles in their future, how it is natural to her, like this, to raise its slender neck to her lips and drink. And then there is sweet wine on her palate, and Silas's hands on her skin, and when she lowers that bottle again, there is his mouth on her skin and she says, breathy and quite without thinking:
"I like the way you touch me."
And leans back into him, til his front presses against her back and it is warm from her shoulders to the small of it, and she can feel the shapes of him behind her. She tips her head back enough to look up at him, offering the wine bottle with a little gesture, but he will have to reach down to take it from her, and acknowledge the view of her breasts within the open neckline of her shirt. Perhaps he will think, when this much of him is touching this much of her, how Arianna lets so few people make contact with her in the schoolyards. How she is quick to feint and dance away. How it is only Silas that slings his arm around her shoulders -- and in truth, this is probably part of why he often slings his arms around her shoulders -- and walks with her in company. This remote and held apart Giametti girl is now leaned into the warmth of him, offering him sweet wine from the bottle, and they are each in a state of notable undress.
[Silas]
I like the way you touch me, Arianna says, and it hitches Silas' breath in his throat, brings his lips to her neck again, and his fingers tracing down her shoulders to her collarbone where it's bared by her open shirt, adjusting it just so. Firelight flickers, and her skin is paler than his despite her more olive complection. His back and torso are of a nearly even color with his arms, hinting at time spent out of doors, uncovered under the sun. When she offers the bottle, he comes around in front of her to take it rather than bending down; the other stool is pulled to next to her, close, so that he can sit with his legs straddled around her. A large, healthy draught of wine is quaffed, and the bottle handed back.
He watches, and sees her shiver, and then, "Your shirt is wet - we should hang it to dry. You'll be warmer without it." His eyes are on hers when he reaches to help with the buttons - questioning, requesting permission. Perhaps he thinks he's being helpful in light of her injured wrist, or perhaps he's doing very little thinking at all. There are a few awkward moments as they decide who will undo the fastenings - his fingers, hers, his gently pushing hers back so he can take care of it. There is some fumbling as he goes, between not watching and being utterly distracted from the task by his friend's eyes, and a moment of awkward laughter as he simply can't get a button for far too long for his liking, but ultimately it's done and then there are his hands, carefully slipping the shirt from her shoulders (a palm grazes a still-bra-covered nipple just barely, just briefly), so that he can hang it next to his, when he decideds to rise to do so.
Through this, he holds her eyes as much as she allows, and it's a thing headier, more intoxicating, than the wine.
"It's a little better already, right?" She'll notice, perhaps, that his eyes are a little darker and more stormy than she's seen them before - a little different. But perhaps that's to be expected, given these new circumstances. He's so very close to her, and now they are both shirtless; this is given no conscious thought when he opens an arm to wrap around her, to draw her close.
[Arianna]
He passes the bottle back to her and Ari sets it aside, back on the table, within ready reach of them both. It leaves her hands free to assist him with the buttons, or to not assist, or to rest, flat-palmed over the pleats of her skirt, where he directs them once it is clear that he has the matter well in hand. Which leaves her wanting to watch him and his eyes at once, and struggling to sit still and to maintain eye contact, struggling not to look down at the way the fabric pulls against her breasts, or the heat of his hands crosses the negligible space between them. This struggle brings an intensity to the way her eyes hold his, as if in that watching she could communicate all the restlessness in her by her unblinking attention, or how her fingers curl into her skirt and then, painstakingly release and lay flat again. Her breathing is not as well schooled as her eyes are on his, and he can feel the catch of it, the way it struggles toward something regular and ready. Her teeth catch the corner of her lower lip in her intense concentration, draw it into her mouth for the tip of her tongue to worry at. All of these small movements, so that she will not lift her palms from her skirt, so that she will not break eye contact with him.
Her eyes close when his palm grazes just so, when he slides the shirt free of her shoulders and her palms must break contact with her skirt to let it slip free of her entirely, when she is finally allowed to give voice to the call to movement within her, and even then, only slightly, only enough that when he draws her toward him her hand falls back to rest not on her own thigh but on his, a warm point on his trouser leg as her shoulder softens and rounds against his chest. Ari reaches up with the other hand to draw her damp hair over her far shoulder, so that it will not be wet and cold against him.
It's a little better already, right?
She answers with the way she relaxes into his embrace, and yet remains taut-tight-ready with the newness of it, the way her fingers curl again but this time it is not just into the fabric of her skirt but also to drag her nails against the weave of his pants, over the strength of his leg. And then in how she tips her chin up, to lay a kiss at his jawline, and then to nip there, gently, uncertain, testing these new addresses of affection that he has taught her tonight. They are strange to her, and he can read her hesitance and uncertainty in it, but also want and affection. It is a heady thing; a heavy thing; she is too new to it to wield it with finesse.
[Silas]
The kiss is rewarded with a smile as Silas runs a hand up and down Arianna's now-bear arm to warm it; the nip gets broadening of that smile and his face turning down so his lips can meet hers. This kiss, like those outside, lingers - testing, slow and gentle as they both explore the limits of this new way of showing affection between them. The kettle, by now, is boiling and the bits of Silas' pants closest the fire are beginning to dry, and both of them are starting to warm. When Silas' lips pull back, it's only slightly, only enough to murmur, "Are you well, Stella?" and to give her room to answer. He is pleased enough here, with her, without the addition of alcohol and so the wine sits on the table, thus far unattended.
Through his trousers, where Arianna touches his thigh, she can feel that he is just as warm there as are his hands, his chest. Against him so, she can feel that his chest isn't quite hairless, and that he must shave his chin and lip but also that the hair that grows on his face is as yet softer than it is scratchy. All these are things that she's not had much cause to know until now.
He only continues when he knows that she's comfortable, and then the kiss deepens again in this slightly awkward position before the fire; soon, they will need to adjust position, or turn their attention to the food they've brought or the wet shirt still on Silas' knee, or any number of things. Soon things will change yet again, if they continue in this manner - and Silas is strangely alright with that. All things change, after all - all things grow and evolve.
It is only when they're both again breathless (and a hand has again found its way to that nexus of rib, stomach, and border of breast) that he pulls back. That he is effected by the proximity and touch is plain, as is the struggle he's beginning to have with keeping it slow.
"Are you hungry?" This, he asks as he stands (and her effect on him is not particularly hidden by school uniform trousers that pull uncomfortably in that place that is still blessedly covered) to finally hang her blouse, and to find a cloth to wet with hot water from the kettle. His knee is already beginning to scab over whatever muck is caught in it, and needs cleaning to avoid infection.
[Arianna]
It's easy to forget for a moment, with his arms around her and the flicker-warmth of the fire touching their skin, and the way the chill has been driven out of the air beside the hearth that the storm around them is vicious and unrelenting. Over the howl of the wind, they can just make out the warning bells and klaxons from the keep calling all students and guardians within the perimeter back into the Institute halls. It is a distant thing, barely recognizable over the din of the storm, except that Silas and Arianna have heard similar klaxons for far more desperate reasons. This may be a decade storm or even a century storm, but it is nothing compared with the breaking edge of the War they endured as younger teens.
Still, it brings a sort of pained hush to the stolen moments between them. Perhaps this is why he asks if she is well, and why she looks at him, oddly, with the corner of her mouth tucked into a curl-smirk, a merriment that cannot hold in light of their newfound nearness. The formality of their language amuses her, but it is also a comfort: she and Silas share many things, the least of which may someday be a House and the trailing litany of names. "How could I be anything but well?"
She treasures each newly learned thing about him, explores with fingertips or the flat of her palm or the brush of her lips -- the warmth of his skin, even closeted under trousers; the scratch-soft of his stubble; the small patches of light-hued hair on his chest; the shape of his muscles, under skin, where they can be marked and traced with fingertips. She is not thinking about all that has changed, or about how things will change after this storm passes.
When Silas rises and dampens a cloth in the hot water of the kettle, Ari rises to cross to him. The space is small, crossing is but a few steps, but there's a sort of plaintive movement to it. She catches up the hand and the washcloth in both of her hands -- "Let me..." she tells him, but it sounds more like a question, and if he allows it she will guide him back to the pair of stools where they were seated. The question of food is left, for now; as is her awareness of the unfamiliar shape and pull of his trousers. Rather than sitting beside him, she cants his injured knee toward the light of the fire and kneels on the rough rug before him to carefully minister to the muck and his wound. She is fastidious and careful in her cleaning of it, gentle touches that sweep the muck away, and then the pulls the cloth back, refolds it to find a new corner to use, and goes back about her work.
Now and then she glances up at him, through her lashes, to take the shape of his eyes or the line of his mouth as guidance on what little she knows of mending. It does not occur to her that her elbows are tucked close to her side, and that from his vantage point this has much the same affect on his view as the Smythe girl's favorite stance. He has ample time to admire how the olive note of her skin makes the pale pink of her underclothes that much easier to name. This is worse, then, than even Katja's trickery as she is kneeling before him, and when she is sure that his knee is cleaned and cared for, she leans in to kiss the skin beside his injury, which brings her head too close to other things, which Arianna might be innocent of but Silas could hardly be faulted for thinking after.
Their classmates will be assembling at rally points by rank and house and schoolyear; it will take time to work through the rosters and identify whomever might be caught out in the rain. Silas's absence will be noted first, as the Initiates come before the unAwakened in priority, though perhaps his recent scandals will leave that lack unremarked upon. And when Arianna is not with the Apprentices, they will assume she is with Initiate Exemptus Haellewyn; and when he does not have custody of her, then he assumes the converse. And Xavi's duty is first to the Keep and secondly to the Giametti girl, so he will be busy for hours yet before the realization dawns that he has lost his charge to something more serious than the library study rooms.
She places her hands on his thighs to steady herself as she rises up from kneeling. This puts her body again between his knees, and her mouth near his, so she kisses him in passing, before rising the rest of the way up to walk the washcloth over to the low workbench, with its shallow sink without a faucet, and the remainder of the bucket of well-water. Without sullying the bucketful, she rinses the muck and blood from the cloth and then adds it to the collection of line-drying things decorating the cabin.
"Better?" she asks him, as she stands beside the hearth, so close to it that the flicker flames are almost painfully hot but far enough so that her skirt will not catch. Where her hair is drying and has begun to fly-away, the firelight wreathes her in red and bronze and amber. And where she has been a dryad or a sylph, perhaps now she is a salamander-queen.
[Silas]
When Arianna is kneeling before him so, Silas bites his lip and resists the urge. When she leans in and blows on his knee, he reaches forward to tangle his fingers in her hair and only barely stops himself from steering her to that unfamiliar-to-her stretch and pull in his trousers. Silas has been spending much time in far different company than hers, after all, and in that company this positioning would have been carefully calculated ahead of time. He knows - of course he knows - that Arianna isn't of that ilk.
Knowing doesn't make it easier.
Alarms sounding at the keep don't make it any easier.
She places her hands on his thighs to steady herself as she rises, she kisses him and he wraps his arms around her to draw her close. It's instinct to press against her, to make known what he's feeling, and can't be avoided or controlled the way other urges were - but then Silas releases Arianna to do as she wills, and he stands to pace the small space they're in. It's too small, claustrophobic in this moment when everything is so tense and full of meaning. When next he turns to see her, Arianna is standing before the fire, so, and the look that crosses his face . . . Silas has no idea what to do now. Not with his hands, not with their time or the space in which they find themselves. All he knows is that now that he and Arianna have kissed, nothing will be the same. It doesn't matter that it was a course of action he hadn't particularly considered before this afternoon; of course he'd known that his friend was attractive, beautiful even, and that she'd been considered quite the match for him up until he Awakened and she hadn't, but all of that was academic knowledge and nothing more.
Seeing here here, like this, after having touched bits of her he'd seldom thought about, Silas is at a loss.
"Better," he says, his eyes heavy and unreadable on her and his body now carefully still. "Thank you."
The quiet is filled with pounding rain, and blessedly the klaxons have stopped; inside, when people realize that the two of them are missing, no one will be particularly worried about him. It's quite possible that no one will consider that the two of them might be together until it occurs to Xavier, whenever that happens. This moment breaks, though, and Silas is suddenly more awkward in a teenager sort of way than anyone in this section of his world has ever seen him; if he had an awkward phase, it was blessedly away from the Houses of Hermes, at least for the most part.
"I . . . there are a few books, there. Nothing particularly interesting, though - and a deck of cards, there." The amusements in this outbuilding are even more sparse than the furnishings. "If we wanted something to do, I mean."
It's easy to forget, most of the time, that Silas is young - this is his sixteenth birthday, regardless of what experiences he's had. The sort of things he might usually do with a girl when they two are left to their own devices may be things he wants very much (Arianna can't possibly be confused about what she felt when he hold her close, what she sees still stretching his trousers if she glances down enough), but they're not things he knows how to approach with her now that they may actually have to talk about it. The only thing clearer than that he cares for Arianna very much is that he wants her at least as much as he cares.
[Arianna]
There are a few books, there... And Arianna's attention immediately slides away to inspect the ready excuse, so thing more steadfast and solid than the thrumming of her heartbeat, but the books to which Silas is alluding are a mere tumble of leaned pages with faded spines and yellowing sheaves and they are sitting on a rough-wrought shelf, and they are nothing remarkable except in that they are here, now. They are a poor excuse, and do not capture of her attention for long, which brings it back to Silas and his heavy eyes, and his pacing, and the tension between them which is at once electric and alarming.
She is still wreathed in fire light, and its touch is hot and sliding against her back, and the skin there is warm to the point of being uncomfortable; everything just now is uncomfortable in some way, when she says, her voice lower and more breathless than he might imagine, with an edge of wonder and a note of worry and all the hallmarks of a girl very much on the edge of some mammoth and inevitable decisions, the way that all such decisions seem in one's late teens:
"I can't think, when I am touching you, except that I wish to remain touching you or you touching me, for as long as you will let me. And then, when I do think, I think that you must think me foolish, like your other girls --- I am not like the other girls. And yet I am, here, longing to touch you more, and to be touched, and yet to not touch, that I might think again. That I may well-reasoned and not so swept away. Oh, stop my mouth," she says, and looks away, and is stern with herself in the hardest way. "That you will not think the less of me or I myself."
The quiet is filled with the pounding rain, and so very many words. It is not so quiet after all. Arianna stands before the fire and professes her conflictedness, and her attraction to him, and her want of his hands on her body and hers on his, and it the quiet, stalwart, steady sentinel that it is, cannot keep up with that sort of competition. Thunder breaks and rolls across the sky, which causes her to flinch and look up at the ceiling of the watcher's hut, just long enough to assure herself that this firmament will hold. That some sort of division would hold tonight, as it would clearly not be the long-established boundary of the friendship between these two young people.
I can't think, when I am touching you ...
Step.
I think you must think me foolish ...
Step.
And yet here I am ...
Step.
Oh, stop my mouth ...
Step.
By the time Arianna finishes speaking, Silas is so close to her that as her back is warmed by the fire, her front is warmed by the strange, not entirely natural (but certainly as natural as anything there is, as natural as Nature, as natural as Life), and those heavy eyes are on hers, in hers. The movement is sudden, but not threatening, when his hand comes to brush hair back, and to stay there at her cheek; it is one more bit of him warm against her when he brings his lips to hers again. It's gentle to start, and the only point of contact is his hand on her cheek and their lips together, but it doesn't stay so sweet or so separate for long.
"What other girls?"
The question comes husked as he brings her closer to him, closes any distance between them so effectively that it would be difficult to pass a piece of parchment between them, and then they're kissing again and Silas is drawing her back with him, away from the fire and to somewhere to more comfortably rest for further exploration of each other and this new way of feeling for each other, of being with each other. That his interest is piqued in ways far more physical and carnal than she might have expected is now unavoidable knowledge; perhaps Arianna has had this sort of attention before, or perhaps it's not been something distant and easily ignored. Here, in Silas' arms when he bumps up against the bed with the backs of his knees and allows her weight to unbalance him until they're both laying awkwardly in the bed, this attention is neither thing.
Not distant.
Not easily ignored.
His lips don't part from hers as he moves them both to better position, with Arianna over him as his hands work their ways in different directions - one to a breast, and one down to her skirt. There, clever fingers find their way around both fabrics - that of her bra, to tease at her nipple, and that of her skirt to touch places that have quite possibly not been touched before. Always he is aware of her reactions - if there's any indication that he should stop, he does. But oh, he absolutely does not want to.
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