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[Gustav]

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Ahh, Ceza, sweet Ceza..

The gentle curves of her slumbering and pleasantly formed figure were bathed in pale light pouring in from the three-quarter moon that lingered in the sky above the latticed window outside. He felt an impulsive desire to explore each of those gently rounded curves with his fingers, as if by touching her this way he would brand her as his forever. It was all he could do to resist the allure of her lying there, defenseless to him, and made even more compelling by the fact that he knew she was unclothed beneath the thin fabric of the bed linens. Yet he hesitated this time, from doing as he pleased while she slept.

Instead, he walked bare-footed across the cold stone floor to the opposite window and perched nude on the worn sill to gaze through the glass portal at the world beyond. The land lay hushed and somber, as if commanded into obedient silence by all those things which go bump in the night so close to the forbidding city of Umbra.

She was perfection to him, a dream he had never thought to experience in wakeful daylight. She had a kind and devoted heart, so devoted in fact that she had even turned to hurting herself over a man in her past. Just being involved with him had put her life at even more risk, if not from those who would see him dead, then from himself. He had taken to appeasing every superstition he'd ever heard of from the elders of the various gypsy camps he traveled between, just to give himself a sliver of peace in regard to her safety. She was simultaneously so fragile and yet one of the strongest women he'd ever known. She'd offered kind words about his colored past and she'd braved his condition. She had done willingly everything he had never asked of her aloud. She loved him.

She was too good for him and he knew it, but he would never tell her that. He would cling to his selfishness and enjoy her while he had the chance. He knew he would eventually be forced to leave her. Even the most loving and saintly of women in his past had discovered a limit to their patience when it came to what he did for a living. They grew tired of asking where he had stolen whatever new trinket or jewelry he had gifted them. He didn't blame them one bit. It was his type that had given his gypsy brethren a bad reputation. The type who had found ways to survive those too often desperate times by taking advantage of trusting people, oftentimes those nearly as desperate as himself.

But Cezanne, she was different from other women he'd known, she was half gypsy herself, and that was why he cursed himself all the more for his selfishness. He could not bring himself to do ill to her or any of his kin. The situation was such an abnormality to him that he was at a loss as to how to handle it, even if he had wanted to.
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It wasn't nailed down, was it? They must not have wanted it.