“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
There is desire and then there is devastation. Both live in her, embers and wildfires, caught between the fragile skin of a desert-bred woman. She is both silk and chain, lash and feather. And she is smoldering when he join her with the smile of a almost-man begging for destruction and calling the flash of heat against his throat desire.
Al'Zahra promises herself, that by the end of tonight, she will teach him the difference between an ember and a wildfire.
Where he shows restraint she has none to share (not with the feeling of steel aching against her jaw). The space between them dissolves like the smoke on her tongue. Like golden patterns of magic used to dissolve into the places between her heart and soul. She touches him, paints him in lines of skin, teeth and liquor, from cheek to ear. In the ocean of him she drowns herself because she is so, so sick of only the taste of embers.
The next sip of her drink does nothing to quench her thirst, or hunger, or reckless need to pick apart this flesh until she discovers again the ferociousness of her first. She starts to feel like flint, and steel, and forest-wood in winter, when she pulls her lips from the hard planes of his face. Her smile has not teeth but bits of sand begging for brine. “Often enough.” She laughs and it's bell-chimes beneath the roaring din of the crowd and the thud of bone dice.
“You didn't drown at sea.” The pillows whisper under her weight as she learns towards him and rests her chin against his withers. “And I didn't think I would care.” An orphan places two more drinks on the table. She does not bother to see if they are correct, only that they are there before she slides one towards him.
Her own tastes like brine and sugar when she raises her chin from him just enough to take a take. “Why did you come back? This world is as dull as it has always been.” And the spark in her eyes when she looks at him, really looks, says that they could change it all.
@August
