The bright sun that rose on the horizon awoke Dixie for her slumber. It stabbed at her eyes like hot needles. She rolled over, expecting to find herself alone in her bed. Instead, she found herself rolling into the arms of a sleeping man.
The sun hadn't quite reached him yet. For a minute, she lay there, just looking at how he looked, laying there. How his long, scarlett hair framed his face perfectly. How his closed eyes concealed a hidden danger, a sleeping dragon, just waiting to be woken. How when he exhaled, his lips curled upwards, exposing two long, menacing. Everything about him oozed with peril. Even Dixie had to admit, the allure of that-
As the light stroked back his hair, his face contorted in what looked to be pain. The young girl's eyebrows creased in confusion and then shot up in realisation. Before she had time to cover him, the man shot up across th meadow, to the refuge of the fringe of trees at superhuman speed.
Dixie shouted across the field, "S-sorry, I forgot." Blaise replied with a chuckle, not looking up.
"Heh its cool, cutie."
She started at a walk over the meadow, but could only make it a pace or two before she doubled over in pain.
When she looked down to see what was wrong, she screamed a shrill cry of shock and horror. In that moment, it all came flooding bak to her. The men...The blood... The alley... The fight... The meadow... The kiss... and then came what happened after the kiss... Oh God. What had she done?
Blaise saw her distress and sprinted over to where she stood, chest heaving, eyes bulging, legs quivering. He took her in his arms and ran her to the safety of the tree fringe. Even as he did so at extreme speed, smoke still followed in his wake. Setting her down, his hand moved to rub his tired eyes and his burned, blistered face.
Dixie's eyes welled up with a flood of tears. "I'm so so sorry. F-for everything." She blubbed, tears streaming down her face like rain in a monsoon.
Blaise sighed and reached out his hand to cup her face, "Don't be sorry, hun. Its my fault." Once again, his eyes roamed her body. She was doused in dried blood from head to toe. Her clothes were torn to tatters back in the meadow. She stood before him, bare as the day she was born, drizzled in dried blood, with more wounds on her than anything he'd seen before, well that wasn't quite true, but he tried to forget about that.
Every square inch of her was either cut open or darkened by the midnight hue of bruising. Her right eye was swollen, a puffy, pink pigment, her left was just as swollen, but sunken, surrounded by a sea of darkness. Her hair clung around her shoulders, matted with sticky scarlett. Her nose trailed red all the way down to her chin, clearly broken. Her lips were chapped and burst. Her neck was badly bruised, also trailing blood. And worst of all, from head to toe, puncture marks covered her silky skin.
Blaise winced, but touched her arm and said "Hey, we both knew what we were getting into. Don't blame yourself, Dix" Her am stung at his touch, and she stared at the ground, going over the situation in her mind. After a few minutes, her eyes slowly met his and she smiled meekly. "Dix?"
He smiled his infamous crooked smile. "Eh don't read too much into it, cutie." She smiled back at him. And everything went black.