She couldn't count how many times her fingers had traveled the expanse of his back, mapping out every dip and curve. Or how her touch became lighter as time went on and the fire in the other room dulled to silence. The crackling had been part of their sinful orchestra they had collaborated on earlier. Now that it had died to smoke and ash, she was left to the growing volume of her own thoughts.

Her hand gestured one last time near his shoulders. A feathering down memory lane; she had mauled them with strawberry scratches and left smears of herself all over him. The taste of him was lingering on her tongue. Careful as she could be, she left his side and allowed him to peacefully keep the bed warm for her. A passing reflection of herself in the mirror gave way to every pound of flesh she was crafted with. Like a nymph in the moonlight, she hunted down a few items to add to inventory; his button up shirt, her tossed aside panties, and a pack of cigarettes she rummaged for in her bag.

Outside was cold. Georgia didn't hail a fierce winter like Rhy'Din did but it brought along goose bumps to tackle her limbs once she stepped out the door. Bare feet made the softest padding against the floor boards when she moved and the barest creak let the moon know she was active. The bare essentials of her wardrobe was more fitted for a wild night of forgetful behavior rather than the eloquent atmosphere she was tossed into.

It was a whole different world, yet even here where there was nothing to remind her of her demons, they still stalked possessively in the back of her mind. And almost with a vengeance, as if they knew she was actively trying to find new avenues to run away from them. This place was all navy dark sky with freckles of a million winking stars that weren't created from the up-all-night skyscrapers of her urban domain. It was a heavenly area that she felt odd in with her cursed and sordid lifestyle.

Smoke that curled away from her mouth played little bits of interesting cinema in front of her. Too dark to notice it's silk grey color but just dense enough to be twisting silhouettes in front of her.

What am I doing here?

That question kept popping up in her head. Big, neon blinking lights of a thought that ripped into her any time she would smile, he would laugh, they would kiss or touch or whisper. A blazing hot side effect of guilt would well up in the pit of her stomach. Everything about their affair was an event that she was having a hard time dealing with.

He was nothing like Tommy. Nothing like Judas. And nothing in comparison to the handful of forgotten names that had shared her sheets a time or two. He stood out for being so normal -- which was odd. She was judging him based on his normalcy rather than his flaws. Did he have any? She was certain that there was a very slim amount of faults that he might have had in comparison to the mountain of ones she had acquired over the years. What monsters haunted him? What nagging regrets did he have? Was he hiding anything from her, like she was from him?

The questions piled up as her cigarette began to diminish, inhale by exhale, ash by ash.

Tommy and her were on the same scale of things. They had been tossed into unpredictable circumstances and became survivors because of it. Each one of them had their fair share of indecencies, while also exuding genuine emotion. There had been more troubled waters than placid ones with their wildfire of romance. He came with a force of urban nature that left her breathless in the wake of the storm. Now she had him to thank for the blood on her hands -- the same blood that she swore would never come off. No matter how many times she scrubbed them she could smell the gun powder, feel the rattle of the weapon, and could hear the last gasping breath of Jack.

He had left her soon after. Left her to spiral even more out of control.

Judas had been the monolith to shadow her afterwards. A man designed to be a weapon, trained to hush the souls of those that were deemed unworthy of breathing. He had a simplicity about his emotions which is why she figured she had fallen so hard for the death-speaker. Where he was harsh, she was soft. Where he was darkness, she was light -- always the light. A piece of sun to the Purgatory of his past, present, and future. They had been so dedicated to cleaning each other off when they fell that she wasn't paying attention to just how far they were falling. He struggled to remain, but all knights of the unspeakable eventually set sail on their own.

He was no different; she recalled the cake she had made for him the day he voiced how he needed to leave. Forever.

"Shit.", she cursed when the ember to her cigarette had burned down to the tenderness of her fingers. It was dropped away much like the nostalgia which made her tear up. Painful things stuffed beneath the heavy web of drugs still humming in her system.

They dulled down more than the memories.

Her hands flew up to push back the salty signs of tears. Smudging away all the moisture like the shadows would tattle on her at a later date for getting so worked up. She felt like too much time had gone since she escaped the domestic confines of that room. Her journey back was just as quiet as when she had left.

From the door way she could see every detail of him. A slice of moonlight seemed to appreciate him, too, as it jaggedly lit up a stripe angled across his back. Content to wade back in the black at a slow, leonine pace until she spilled back into the comfort of the bed.

It wasn't the bed that was comfortable, though.

It was him.

Two nights and almost two full days later and she was not left out on the curb like a forgotten seraphim. Each moment spent had been well worth the nervosa she had faced before the mini-vacation. She had been introduced into a world of normalcy where the air was breathable and the stars actually shone. It would be a lie to say that she missed the grime and hustle of the urban districts -- her districts.

Her kingdom was not a kingdom at all, but a torn down sad state of affairs. Her subjects were gutted husks of men and women who used to have a soul, but now just traded whatever was in their pockets for another moment to forget. To be lost in a daze where it was easy to pretend the world outside wasn't cold and cruel. The castles were run down projects that housed prime examples of junkie queens and horrific kings.

And she was in the heart of it all; her little sanctuary was fashioned with twitching neon lights and old soda machines drawn on by warring groups of vultures. Here is where she lay her head at night and where she went searching for her spirit in the morning. It acted as another piece of the facade that she had stitched together over the years. There was nothing materialistic about it. Nothing worth confiscating, or fighting over.

Except for what lay in the hidden crevices of her Bohemian domain.

The over night bags she had packed were tossed to the corners of the compacted room. There was a large bed in it's center. A small dresser, one littered with trinkets from back home at Emerald Court -- movie tickets, love letters, cheap jewelry from the boardwalk, and strewn about Polaroid photos. Clothes were compiled here, or there. Again, it was a pauper's room that planned on being a princess. Some day.

She could still smell the lingering scent of Ford on her clothes, on her skin. Her lips were a bit numb when she thought about how his teeth nipped at her, or how his tongue said the right things at the right time. Hands grabbed at the shirt she was smuggling her bones and skin in, hefting it up to breathe in the left over residue from her trip to his home. It wasn't hard to recall the moments spent next to him, under him, on top of him. He had this way of grinning that was infectious enough to paralyze her into mimicking it. Her first impression had been right; he was a jester that saddled up in the simple array of shirts and jeans, ball caps and five o'clock shadows.

The shirt was let go to flutter closer to the wings of her collar bones. She gave up on daydreaming and settled onto the carpet of her room. On all fours she prowled, scooping to the side to drape her grip on the legs of the dress. It was tugged on with a girlish grunt to drag it away from it's normal placement. She had so many things to hide and only so many places to stuff them.

Off white paint had been scratched off from the brick behind it. There was creasing a long the edges of maybe four of those bricks that were closest to the floor. She dug her fingers in against the top of one to begin to unlatch it from the rest. Three more followed, all of them stacked sloppily next to her. One hand reached inside the black hole space she had exposed. The rummaging brought a snicker from her lips when she pulled back with a bit of dirt and dust caked onto the tips of her fingers. Seven thick stacks of rubber banded bills were rolled a long the carpet to match up against the bricks.

She practically eased onto her side, squirming closer to reach her arm completely in the secret compartment she had carved for herself so long ago. Padding her palm and wiggling her fingers, she sought after something that seemed to keep her more interested than money did.

There was a rattle of noise, a crinkle of plastic, and an expression of relief.

She pulled back, clutching the edges of two large Ziploc bags filled with pill bottles. Each one looked identical to the one she had stored away for her over night stay with Ford, except these were filled to the max capacity. Bloated and glistening in their cocoons of plastic, she tossed them onto the bed so she could work on dusting herself off and standing back up.

Trouble sat in the door way. His eyes were just as half-mast as hers usually were. He made a whimpered mewl sound that didn't seem to go with his thick body.

"I know, I know --", she crooned to the only thing that knew all of her secrets. "-- I'll tell him. Just not yet, yea'?"

There was no off switch to the empty abyss of how she felt. The sinking feeling that would eventually snuff out some of the light on her skin. She was vulture shouldered in a hunch at the sink, her fingers going bone white from gripping like petite vices to the edge of it's bowl. A little bit of pain shot in her arms, coiled into the tense nest of her shoulders.

Concern was a dilemma for the nymph. The ability to control her emotions was just a performance. A thing of habit from a girl with so many masks that she forgot what she looked like with out one of them on. It was a voluntary submission when she stepped out of her comfort zone, out of the shallows of being f*cked up, all to worry about a galore of things.

It was so mundane, so easy, to cause a scene out of the simplicity of being let go -- but she was never a very realistic girl. Her mood swung fiercely in her mummification of flesh, threatening to tear down the walls that she so carefully built over the years.

A wave of nausea swarmed had her dry heaving into the gut of the sink. Her stomach was empty, her blood was hot, and the world spun off it's axis for a brief slice of time. Her eyes shuddered in their sockets and created a tremor of her reflection in the mirror. Pieces of blonde swung, rope like, in front of her features while her forehead glistened with the spring of a cold sweat.

It was the charade of shadows behind her, beyond the frame of the bathroom door, that made her tongue go dry. Her throat felt pinched beneath fingers, just at the center of her jugular. All the rippling behind her was associated with the onset sickness -- but it quickly seemed more alive than her imagination.

Brief snippets of a cinema screen flickering on and off took over the mirror. Static and snow, grey blended with fragments of white. Her reflection fizzled into sight again. It had a mind of it's own to smile back at her even as the skin around the cheek bones started to bubble. To melt. A plastic Barbie type of scene that was roasted in unseen fires. There wasn't bone beneath but gossamer bits of crawling insects -- beetles of opalescent white that sprouted from eye sockets and crawled on the other side of the mirror.

They were singing, humming; childish laughter in their wing beats. More and more. It was a plague of them with the remains of her smile flashing somewhere in all the creasing of their pearl shaped bodies.

She bent her head down and shut her eyes. The feeling of her hair over her nude shoulders felt heavy, slick like seaweed across her tepid flesh.

Ten... Nine... Eight...

A countdown began with her lips trembling, the words barely breathed.

She thought of the actuality. The possible scenarios she had been in recently. Anything to keep her grounded, to shackle her to the linoleum of the bathroom.

Fords kisses. The riverboat casino. Her sordid affair with a pill bottle. Jackie and her in bunny ears. Jane crying on her shoulder. Nigel's bastard grin.

Seven... Six... Five...

Fingers tightened when she became bold enough to glimpse at the mirror. The beautifully bizarre creatures behind it chittering a type of song that she thought she could understand. It was old, rustic with the hymn of something far from her finger tips.

Her eyes shut, her lips moved.

Four... Three... Two...

The world went quiet but she didn't dare chance a look -- not yet. She waited in the hollow of the silence when she heard a war drum of pulsing in her head and a heavy exhale of breath. Her body had her full attention.

"One."