She is perfectly useless in nudging for sexual suggestion, watching his fingers pass over the moonstone glint of her warm skin. Where he touches her, she feels it long after he’s gone. The flesh grows colder. It aches for him to touch it again.
There are horror yarns, traumatic narratives that circulate in the bawdy, awful events of culls she’s witnessed herself or heard of, being remote, using the girls for what they came for with cruel abandon. Men with big hands who remain a distance away whilst they conduct their rough act, unfeeling and melancholy. Daphne had said that it would be a mistake to be close to him, for her first time. That it would form an unrealistic attachment, an unrealistic expectation for others.
She considers. Decides she doesn’t care what Daphne said.
“I want to be close to you. Close together, not far apart. I want to do that.”