REXANNA
paint my spirit gold
She’s pleased when she captures his gaze, when her story invokes such interest. But it’s nothing compared to what spills out of his mouth. And she listens at first, a soft smile on her lips that slowly begins to fade as the story gets darker and darker and darker, while he wraps himself tighter as if he can squeeze himself out of his own existence. And her heart yearns for him, to comfort, to hold, to quell in the worries he has. A small amount of anger at the man, the boys father, brims at first – soon replaced with a small amount of relief that they had gotten away from it.
But then, he speaks of the drugs, and the humans, and her dark brows inch toward one another in concern as his tone goes dead and he seems to stare at something that’s not there. And she takes a moment to contemplate drifting over to his edge, to embrace, to hold, to comfort. And while he continues on, she waits to see just how bad it gets before she takes any action.
And it gets so much worse. By now, a frown replaces the soft smile originally on her lips, thoughts drifting back to the term he had given her – realizing what it means now, and seeing the young boy before her, and had she still had her previous lungs, she would’ve exhaled a small whoosh of a sigh of sadness for the boy that had experienced so much in such a short amount of time. At least Rexanna had about ten years on the boy. This? This was terrible.
The concern only grows further when he mentions he’d returned home one day to find his mother dead, and she folds her arms across her chest briefly. He mentions calling the police, another term she doesn’t understand, but she nods along in feigned understanding if only to not make him recall it further. But she can see the shine in his eyes as he attempts to joke, and she stands from her seat across from him to join him on the couch, pulling the blankets nice and tight around him, to cocoon him better than he could do himself.
To coddle.
To hold.
And then she leans in, uncertain of what to say – if anything is good enough to say for something so terrible. And instead, with a small amount of shine to her own eyes, she attempts to pull him in for a tight hug, to hold him tight to her chest while she offers her own crookedly fanged smile back to him, whether he can see it or not. “Princes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.” She attempts to joke, but her voice wavers slightly. “Noble pricks, are more like it.” She adds on.
