Emberwood swallows circling with their shimmering sound

His grumble turned into a playful growl when she turned her head away. The male followed after her, closing the small amount of space she'd put between them to cover her face in sloppy kisses. Perhaps as punishment, but perhaps out of desperate affection. If there was anything on his mind, it was not the sort of thing he could put into words - more of a mantra put together from instinct and feeling. Anger, loss, need. Anger, loss, need.

It coursed like blood through his body, and ache soothed by moments like this, only to become all the more painful when those moments ended. But like the starving creature he'd become, Grayday had learned to take what he could get. It was not something that he thought of consciously, but rather, a knowledge that he'd hidden deep within his psyche.

So he didn't know why her words made him so uncomfortable. Not exactly.

"Maybe," he said, at length, his voice a bit gruff. He wasn't sure how he was doing. He felt good, certainly. Or did he? It was hard to tell with Akuti so close, but he thought that, in the moments before her arrival, he'd been in a fine place. Shouldn't he be in a better one now that she was here? He thought so, but when he tried to feel it, there was only a strange pit of nervous energy in his belly. "What about you?" he finally asked, seeking to draw the attention away from his own (complicated, worrying, frustrating) situation. "Are you okay?"