Deepwood Weald the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees

I am so sorry for her behavior. ♥ [throws a bucket of cold water over her]

Immediately after the tears start coursing down the black velvet of her cheeks and the hiccupping sobs start wracking her gravid frame, Lotte begins a fierce campaign against what she perceives to be weakness in herself. “Tyhmä, tyhmä tyttö!” she sniffles between hitching, shivering breaths, abhorring the husky thickness and trembling cracks that sully the purity of her warm, rich alto. It isn’t out of the ordinary for the rogue to berate herself in such a ribald fashion, but it is exceedingly rare that she actually buys in to such self-deprecating talk. Tonight, though? She’s bought it all — horse and carriage, hook, line, and sinker.

She hates his apology — hates the way his mouth moves when he says it and the way his dark, alluring timbre swells with sorrow and stress that he doesn’t deserve. The revulsion she feels upon seeing her husband so defeated causes her to shake her head violently in negation. “No!” she snaps, past the point of caring who hears her. “Not you — never you — ” she protests, her black-masked features twisting and contorting as she tries to fight off the next wave of weeping and loses. Lotte is overwhelmed with stressors emotional, mental, and physical, infuriated at herself for losing control to such a colossal degree, and unable to see anything clearly through the blur of saline. There is a deep-seated need to be home that she can’t get past, and she edges closer and closer to her breaking point. Absurdly, she wishes Arturo would get angry along with her, using her flesh as his battleground. The score of his teeth against her nape becomes an almost physical need as the masks jumble in her hands and she recalls Kitku’s perverted love for violence.

She would gladly go to war for Arturo, but she cannot fight this.

The gangster’s soothing words fall upon deaf ears, but it isn’t that Lotte isn’t listening to him. She is. She’s just listening so closely that the words don’t seem like words anymore. They’re just sounds — pleasant, rhythmic sounds — and she is impatient for them to stop. Once they do, she lurches forward on ungainly legs — nightingale, nightingale, Dagfinn, nightingale — and mouths with swift intensity at the fur that crests his shoulder. A desperate moan that, taken out of context, would pantomime pleasure, wheedles from her lips — and in that moment of broken silence, she hears herself and recoils with a gasp.

Quiet now, she examines the damp fur as if it’s someone else’s handiwork. Fortunately the flesh there is not bleeding or even bruised, but she is ashamed nonetheless. “I am sorry,” she intones softly, eyes dry. “I do not know what came over me. No matter where our children are born,” if they live, “my home is with you, Turo. I wanted to be strong for you — for Teaghlaigh — but I am not.”