i love these hands

"That afternoon, however, she couldn’t help thinking about what Martha had said, and as Harley moved back and forth in the dim space of the bell tower she noticed how beautiful his hands were: fine, almost delicate, not large and heavy, like other men’s hands, but strong nevertheless, like a pianist’s or a dancer’s. Of course, as soon as the notion entered her mind she did everything she could to extinguish it, because she didn’t want to think about him in that way. Yet she kept coming back to him: to his dark eyes, to the way he carried himself, and, time and again, before she could stop herself, to the beauty of his hands. Hands she wanted to feel on her skin, light and slow and graceful; not heavy, never heavy, but gentle the way a bird is when it alights on a branch or a stone, resting for a moment but never entirely settled, always light, always about to take off." -John Burnside, "The Bell Ringer"