"O you," a woman read softly, and even those two syllables rolled like honey through the Spectre's veins. She leaned forward to listen, as if being a few centimeters closer could somehow bring more of that voice - God, that voice - into her ears.
"O you," the words were repeated, "Whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you." The words flowed, smooth and steady like the unpunctuated line but with her own, rather suggestive stress patterns. The blue-clad woman stirred in her seat, uncomfortably aroused and painfully aware of it. Did she really have to murmur 'come' in quite that tone of voice? In just one spoken line, the smaller woman had utterly captivated her. It was fortunate that the poem was almost brutally short. Only two lines - although long ones - remained.
"As I walk by your side or sit near," the reader nearly purred, and had the soldier been Whitman himself she might have struggled for words to express her feelings at that moment, "or remain in the same room with you, little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me."
Later she would admit to only the most vague awareness of what had finally snapped her control. Was it the clipped cadence as Samantha purred about subtle electric fire, or the frankly suggestive way she'd drawled out 'within me' in that impossibly alluring accent? Ashley had no idea.
She pounced.
