Re: second floor ; smoking
"I prefer your language too," she confessed without shame. "I like how elegant and soft things that aren't like me sound," she added, an American through and through, despite her claims of knowing his tongue in some capacity. "I feel like I should hide that from you, but I don't feel like heeding that feeling tonight." Forbidden things were plentiful in her time, and she loved tasting them, even if it just meant saying things that would be considered shocking. Shocking then, and shocking for who she was away from here. "I'm not the first to flatter you," she acknowledged blithely, recognizing that he'd given his first blush to someone who wasn't her. "Do you like the attention?" She loved attention, though the kind of attention she craved didn't come from fans or spotlights or studio executives.
Her fingers were cold in his. They had none of the insidious lining of age, and none of the mottling of skin that declared a woman no longer beautiful. Her fingertips trembled, but she'd become so inured to it that she didn't notice the shake. She saw past it to his hands, and it was his fingers she looked at as he spoke. "Words aren't what matter, actions are." She slid her hand from his, and she lifted her mortuary fingers to his cheek. "Touch is action." She smiled, eyes going deeper with the incongruous brightness of youth in the delight. "You can see feeling in an expression, and you can sense it what lovers do. A man doesn't have to be Casanova; he only needs to be genuine." The longing in her voice went deeper than a night of watchful death on a ship. "Not that I mind Casanova," she added, the lighthearted teasing back, and all severity gone with the slip of her hand and another grimace of pain.
She waved the stitch of ache when he asked. "It's nothing," she repeated. What ailed her was death and metaphor, and she knew nothing of either. "Don't ask a girl about being ill. She's never supposed to admit to that sort of thing," she chastised, the beautiful young actress once more. "Can you find her again, this woman who's gone?" She smiled. "Of course there are people I miss. Loads of them," she assured him with no truth behind the declaration. "I ask you, is there any point in missing someone who doesn't miss you in the same manner? Will you laud adoring without being adored?"
Nephritis chuckled at his acknowledgement that men were like children. "You're only hard to shake until you have that bone between your teeth. Once you get a taste, you want a new bone." She looked around when he turned his hands over. "You'd rather be freeing the ship and all its passengers," she reminded him warmly. "What of family and friends, are they here with you? You said your father shared your cause."