Doves and Peacocks
Touches, perhaps accidental
It began with little touches at first—accidental brushes of hands and bumping of shoulders, moments of leaning in too far.
And then those brushes became intentional, slipped in amid too-eager conversations in the setting sun. Sometimes Aleigh took Ruthenia's hand to squeeze it when he seemed to think he could get away with it, and she let him, though she always convinced herself it didn't mean what one conventionally thought such a gesture to mean: that it must be some obscure Arcane expression of trust. The other meaning simply wasn't possible.
And then it went beyond brief touches, too, and they began to hold hands in earnest, when no one was looking, and Ruthenia had to wonder if the gestures might actually mean something other than trust and care. And that, maybe, she had overlooked the slim chance that there was some other kind of intimacy wrapped up in it. But he was the Arcane Prince, a whole royal, and there could not possibly be anything about her that distinguished her from the thousands who must have fancied him before.
It took her weeks after the inconvenient feelings rose to awareness before she finally came to terms with it.
That is where she was until the ordeal, the everything, picked up her life and upended it. And then she held him all the way home, arms looped around his waist, face to his back, now so easy it astounded her they had come to this point.
She only had so many minutes to accept that her infatuation was still alive and kicking. And then, after one longing sunlit gaze too many, it happened: her first kiss. And Aleigh was too eager for anyone sane to believe it had meant nothing. But Ruthenia was not sane, and even after that, she convinced herself to think nothing of it.
It was a pattern with them. Escalating intimacies that both had somehow managed to dismiss. It took spoken words for them both to be sure beyond a doubt: she was in love with him, and he with her. And they had both been, for a while, from the day they had first held hands.