Nala'seyes lingered on Cassius's face, so close to hers she could feel the warmth of his breath. Her heart gave a strange flutter as a thought trickled through her mind, soft but insistent: her instincts hadn't been wrong.
This man really was interesting. More than interesting, he was easy. Easy to talk to, easy to bicker with, easy to...exist beside.
Normally, when she spoke, when she blurted out her eccentric thoughts or rambled on about something nobody else would dare to say, the air always grew heavy.
People smiled politely, nodded along, but their eyes betrayed the awkwardness, the discomfort. They never said it aloud, but she could feel it, the silent judgment, the recoil. Her honesty, her strange way of viewing things, always made others uneasy.
But here? With him? It wasn't like that at all.
She could say anything, anything, and instead of recoiling, he would simply one-up her. No awkward silence, no dismay, no pitying looks.
