Hushed Willows [m] Never gonna allocate all of this dark hate

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: References to past sexual assault

Tag for ref! All welcome!

Reverie had not tried to prompt intimacy from @Boone since the day she'd made him feel unsafe. The realization had delivered a harsh blow to her confidence, but more than that, it had started to stir — memories. Things she would rather not remember at all.

Riordan. He was dead now, her final memory of him a ruin of red and exposed bone and sinew, and Reverie had always wondered why she had not grieved the sight of it. But she remembered now. "If you love me, you'll learn to like it." And the feeling of being paralyzed, of not wanting to hurt him with her rejection even as he was hurting her. And crying into the silence of the aftermath, and finally running, and finally forgetting.

She wished she could forget again. She wished she had never looked for Boone that day. There was a new fear in her now, a fear that she had become someone she no longer knew. That she was like Riordan; someone who hurt those she loved.

Sometimes it was all just too much. Reverie paused in her task of marking the borders, plagued by her thoughts, and went to her den. There she retrieved a bundle of dried leaves she'd collected while autumn was still in its early stages, a broad-leaf plant she knew as catwort. She set a few leaves aside and returned the rest to its place.

Reverie took the leaves with her to Opal Lake, settling beside it to chew them slowly. She watched the sun creep across the sky. And she did not think about Riordan.