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It was a wonder he could get anything out between her scratches at the back of his neck, his hairline shrinking away in alarm, his bottom lip between her teeth, his everything wrapped around her little finger.
"Who said I didn't?" she countered, letting her S's sting his tongue as she grinned too-widely against him. It was unnerving, to say the least, someone's fingers running through his hair who wasn't trying to rip his head off his body, and it chilled him to the bone for all the right reasons.
He forgot how to reply for a moment, lost in a Raven Reyes he'd never known and always heard about.
When she ripped away from him with a laugh, you could see him visibly crumple, fold into himself like a chair no longer needed for company. "I'd better get back to the shop," he heard her say, but it didn't process; all he could think about was the absence of her in his tentative arms.
"Right. Get back." She laughed at the starstruck look on his face, but he didn't mind -- she was looking at him, really, in a way no one ever had before.
Murphy had long ago stopped taking part in hunting trips; he would leave that to the gunmen, the soldiers, the ones who'd been trained by the Ark to grasp a life in the throes of death.
Still, he didn't mind ripping the pork apart with his teeth -- after all, everyone had to survive in some respect. Maybe there's more to life than just surviving. Sure, for the lucky ones, but John Murphy had never been one of them.
Her shadow appeared before she did, growing smaller and more fragile until he pushed away the tarp door of her workshop and she came out, all fire and steel.
He felt his voice catch -- he saw Miller laugh behind his hand -- but he still couldn't look away. And when she started walking toward him, boy, he was undone. Half her face was illuminated in the harsh roasting fire, the other shrouded in a darkness he knew all too well, and she just looked so wow, sauntering up to him with a cocky smirk playing on her lips, locking eyes with him like no one else was relevant (he was half sure he was imagining it, especially since witnesses claimed she waved to both Lincoln and Abby Griffin). It didn't matter, here she came, to sit down right next to him, her brace groaning as she leaned over to take his skewer of pork right out of his hands -- with, of course, no arguments from Murphy himself.
They sat in silence for an eon and a half before he had the nerve to speak again. "Why don't you hate me?" He asked again, as if this time he might get a better answer, one that didn't make him remember who he was and what he'd done.
She didn't reply; she licked the skewer clean and handed it back to him, scooting closer in the process and drooping a lazy arm into his lap.
"I'd probably hate me too," he told her, honestly, biting his lip and trying to remember what it felt like when Raven did it.
She gave him a long hard look, calculating but melancholy, before decidedly planting a harsh kiss on his jawline, right there in front of anyone, with a strange, unfamiliar heat that sent him reeling.