Chapter Text
For all that he is always complimenting her beauty, Hugh never comments on his own.
It can’t be that he’s blind. His eyes work just fine whenever she gathers her skirts up and ties them around her waist to climb the apple trees, -and he tells her so every single time, with an appreciative whistle that earns him a stray apple chucked at his head.
Yet, looking into the mirror, he does not seem to perceive what she does.
Where she sees his crooked nose, wishes to run her index down its slant, over the bridge, rejoices when she finds she can, he sees the fights that broke it, ugly and raw, born not from survival, but community, sport.
She sees the sharp jaw she adores pressing kisses to and the clench of his father’s. He sees dark eyes, not unlike Hugh’s own, under thick dark eyebrows, furrowed in displeasure, hears stern words, spoken with a roughness the man’s son never adopts with those he calls his own.
He has dimples he doesn’t know of, for how should he, never smiling hard enough when he gazes in the mirror, but she does. They’re the perfect form to rest the tip of the fingernails of her pinkie in. She thinks it just another testament to the truth that they were made for one another.
He’s perfect.
Still, when he draws her in by the waist and croons something about her eyes, low in her ear, she doesn’t tell him.
Filthy hypocrite.