I Walk the Line ♤ (gxg)

chapter 17: hovering

They spent the rest of that afternoon in a comfortable silence that neither of them was bothered by.

Willow, as much as she wanted to trust the girl, could not make the mistake of leaving her alone in her room again. So she simply sat down at the table, trying her best to concentrate as she scribbled important things down in her book for business and things of the such; but every time the girl watching TV across the room from her would move even a muscle, her eyes discreetly snapped towards her. The doors were locked; she knew she couldn't escape. But maybe that wasn't the reason why she kept finding her eyes so fixated on the girl.

They went to sleep early that night, both emotionally exhausted from the day. August was exhausted from crying like a baby on the rooftop and fearing that Willow was going to rip out her windpipe, and Willow was exhausted from the troubles plaguing her mind. She was trying to swallow down the softness in her that she so obviously had for August. She knew that it was dangerous and wrong and so out of her usual, but as she laid down next to August that night, she found some sort of delight in the smell of her French vanilla soap; and she listened as the girl's breathing eventually slowed as she fell asleep, her body slightly moving up and down with every breath. Willow didn't know why she listened, but she couldn't stop. No matter how much she shifted in her bed or tried to count sheep, the girl simply sleeping next to her was troubling her so that she could hardly close an eye the entire night.

♠

As August's eyes opened the next morning, she rubbed her arms together and felt relief at the fact that she hadn't woken up handcuffed. Her eyes flickered open to see that during her sleep she had rolled over onto her left side and was lying right beside the woman who was still asleep on her back, August's arms only inches away from her bare shoulder.

August started to pull her arms away and roll over, feeling like she was invading the woman's personal space, but something stopped her from doing so. Maybe it was the way the woman's chest was lifting and then falling again with her every breath, but somehow, in that moment, the big bad Willow looked so...vulnerable.

Maybe sometimes in August's mind the woman was too cool to be real, too cool to be human. But there, on that bed in the silent room, August held her breath as she watched the woman do something so normal and so mundane that literally every human to have ever walked the earth did—breathe. Willow was human, after all, and she had two lungs laying beneath her chest for a reason.

Her sense of vulnerability perhaps also came from the way she was asleep, unconscious in a room with a girl who was not handcuffed and a loaded gun sitting right there on the table in the living room. August had every opportunity in the world to escape. She could get the gun, kill Willow, flee out the door, and again taste freedom. She had to admit that it was very noticeable the way Willow was slowly but surely letting her guard down around her, something that she would've wanted more than anything two days before.

But August didn't get up. She didn't get the gun, she didn't kill Willow, she didn't open that door and escape. She only laid there, her eyes memorizing every place that the woman's strands of raven hair fell across the pillow and her chest. She could finally look at her face without having to be permeated by those cool green irises that made her stomach twist. Willow's eyebrows looked sarcastically arched even in her sleep. August smiled, thinking to herself that she was probably smarting off to someone even in her dreams.

Her eyes trailed down to her lips. They were very plump and wide, and August remembered every time she had seen those pearly whites shine through beneath them and how small dimples would sometimes appear in the creases of the woman's mouth. She had thin smile lines, something that gave away the fact that she was nearing her thirties; but it was the only thing besides her sophistication and the way she held herself that indicated the woman was older.