He had been young once, and she had been much too old for a girl of seventeen. Her hair had dulled, faded to a coppery-brown; movement adopted a sort of slowness and her eyes... Her eyes spoke of many instances she had spent in the dark, in every sense of the word.
He used to sit and wonder how she could be so morosely electrifying and why she made him feel so immature. He was thirty-nine years old, and yet he could have sworn he was just thirteen -- twisted and tied in the throes of something not quite love but never lust. She was choking him, he supposed, and this is what it felt like to be throttled by a girl who knew too much.
"You intrigue me," she said once, tone dark as poison. She looked up from a book she had been perusing, pale face glowing in the light of several dripping candles.
She wasn't particularly beautiful, by the world's standards, but there was something about her that left him at a complete loss for words. She was tragic; a damsel in distress, per se, who desperately needed rescuing from her own bitter memories.
"Do I?" he replied, wondering just what it would take to release her from the ball and chain that had been wrapped around her mind.
"Oh, very much so." She returned to her reading after that, eyes never leaving the curling yellow pages -- much to his chagrin.
She told him once that she frequently downed a bottle of firewhisky over the course of a day, something like Word War One and Two veterans who had seen too much bloodshed and needed to escape their nightmares. She told him that when she was inebriated, the visions blurred out and all she saw afterwards was his face.
"I'm sorry," he had said, frowning deeply.
But she came back at him with "Oh, don't be! I quite like your puzzling little face." and placed her lips on the center of his forehead, leaving him with a mark of blood-red affection where everyone could see it.
"Do you know what I think?" she added as an afterthought, looking up at him with a wicked smile.
"No, but I'd kill to find out."
She chuckled and patted his cheek with a slender hand. "I think red suits you."