she wore her mortality like a tight black $5 dress. her energy was rare, questionable smile tickled much more by shock and denial at her situation than the liquor.

her amber eyes peered into the crowd from over a similarly colored añejo. this one would not be spit back into the cup at the sight of him. when he strode up, she was leaning casually on her forearm against the bar. was he… her date? was that technically what this was? it hadn’t registered as such initially, but as his strange compliments flowed so easily, it clicked.

this wasn’t about to be one of those ‘i like to dance alone’ moments, like she’d grown accustomed to back home when they’d had business in places like these. she’d invited him in, flipped their own strange dynamic on its head and essentially said fuck it. why? the reason was lost on her, beyond that it might have been her last night on earth, and she didn’t want to spend it drinking alone. where it led beyond that was really anyone’s guess.

her thin brows raised at him, teeth flashing a moment before she realized quite how fucked up his opening line was. darkening only momentarily, she leaned towards him some. “no one would think that.” she assured him, her voice teasing heavily. he probably looked like just as much trouble as she did in a place where ink like his was so counter-culture. she bit the tip of her tongue at him through the grin, eyes flashing flirtatiously for the most fleeting of moments.

then, the first time she’d touch him intentionally, she reached out a hand and nudged his chin up with a finger. her eyes were deadly poisonous despite the deceptive light in the rest of her face. “careful what you wish for, pinstripes,” reverting back to the first nickname she’d ever given him, “i can crush a man’s skull with these.” dancing didn’t equate to stumbling back to a room and fornicating. he was still the enemy. inappropriate was right—on both ends.

with that, she bit her lip and grinned again, pulling away a little to sashay around him and assess the dancefloor. then, that bit about the casino. reality threatened to sober her a moment before she shoved it off her shoulder. admit to nothing, even when he’d figured it out. “you had me there. i’m lucky, remember?” don’t answer that.

she finished her drink and put it on the counter, and then, casting loki’s best come-hither glance over her shoulder at her fire-haired companion, she disappeared into a crowd of bodies, slithering through them with skin that shied away from touch until she found the right spot where she could move on her own. every corner of her body swiveled on the anchoring movements of her hips as she settled in, lulled to a trance by the overload of her senses as the world drifted away. for a moment, she closed her eyes, forgetting everything, even him, as he made his decision on whether or not to follow her.

the lights flashed green, yellow, pink, blue.

she saw the spectrum’s aura behind her eyelids, and then, the abstract shadows and shapes of faces as she blinked open again. they changed into features of old friends, and the shared body heat in the room was suddenly a welcomed feeling. she breathed freely, transported by specters, by sensual gravity, and by liquor. a gunshot rang out to her left.

her breath hitched and she flinched sharply in the other direction, only to receive a strange look from a man closest to her. it had only been in her head. the cold electric feeling washed through the rest of her and out from her toes as she blinked it away in ripples. feeling somewhat embarrassed but also accustomed to these moments, she was sure to only skip a beat, her movements picking back up again, green boots probably leaving bits of soot behind on the floor in their wake.

her muscles were still loosening from the tension of her momentary slip when he parted through the crowd. she hadn’t made herself too difficult to find. her eyes found his, only looking troubled for a second still before she willed the demon off her back again and focused on him—sort of like how she focused on cards in the morning: nose below walnut eyes, elusive smile below nose, strong jaw below elusive smile. meditate on the shapes of him all and their arrangement, because it meant nothing.

she’d always had a thing for brown eyes, though. she’d not realized that until now.

she moved closer to him, staring closely in an almost objectifying way before visibly rediscovering his humanity, and retracting a hair. she continued to silently regard him with her eyes as she twisted more comfortably in front of him, a wall lowering somewhere in her gaze, and an unexpected heat rising up through her.

lulu, from her perspective, always did what she was supposed to do. she didn’t often break away from orders, or from loyalties. her only love had been from the flock provided to her, a pre-determined type, and not necessarily a great one, despite all residual heartache that might’ve suggested otherwise without context. lulu was naïve to a fault in some ways.

this break from the norm; this sort of fun little dissociative trance that she was in—it was sort of hot. and it wasn’t even that he was attractive, which he was, or that they looked like one symbolic, vivacious flame, dancing that close—it was that he was different, and that she really shouldn’t, because things got complicated at that point. only, they wouldn’t, because she was dead. there was no complicating things as a dead person. dead was simple.

more than one song passed before her eyes left him. her boldness then moved to a different sense: touch. she’d kept space between them, for a while, but as she’d processed the feelings in her body, she spun to dance with her back to him, only casting a look over her shoulder and feeling an unexpected jolt in her chest and elsewhere at the sight of that jawline at a certain angle above in her peripheral view. with a breath, she led his hands to her firm hips, encouraging him to feel both her rhythm, and the edge of undergarment; urging him to sync with her.

she felt like water—until the rock of his chest brushed so gently against her back, and the hairs on her neck prickled and her waves iced over a little. her breath hitched, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice the momentary discomfort; her weakness, the shyness as though she hadn’t expected the spark at the tips of his fingers that shot through her bones. what he wouldn’t see was the way her brows stitched together as she looked down at his hands where she’d placed them, and the way her eyes watered until she shook that off too.

she’d felt closeness so rarely in her life, and a moment like this exposed that fact to her, ripped it out of some compartment in her mind and waved it in front of her, and it was crippling, until she shoved it back into the bursting mental filing cabinet labeled ‘fucked up’.

while her head spun and fell, her body never stopped dancing. she kept her darkness to herself with the same detachment that had caused her to change the subject when he’d started to show her his own.

songs passed. she felt his touch wander, and she never stopped him, moving underneath, against, more freely as she adjusted. she would face him occasionally, her eyes softening more each time, getting closer, until eventually, her gaze hung a bit longer and contained something totally different than what they’d ever shown him. not blinking, she smoothly slipped a finger into a belt loop on his pants, and pulled on it a little. it was a soft motion, and then, she suddenly moved more boldly. her smaller fingers curled around what they could hastily find of his and she turned to begin to pull him out of the crowd.

she didn’t look back at him as they made their way down the hall, keeping her determined expression to herself. she sashayed a little bit from the alcohol, but her gate was persistent, confident. she led him to her room, unlocking the door in a swift movement, and then continuing to lead him in, dropping his hand somewhere. she walked over to the nightstand, where sat a bottle of tequila, a pack of cigarettes, book of matches and a small plastic cup from the bar with water at the bottom. she scratched a match across phosphorous, and lit a smoke.

hitting deeply a couple of times, and still staring at him, she then grabbed the bottle, and turned it bottom-up for a few glugs—and then, in the same movement, proceeded to peel up her dress, expertly avoiding the cigarette still hanging out of her mouth.

suddenly, what seemed to be a mostly blank canvas of tan skin revealed to be an intricate display of artwork. serpentine dragons, flames, gears, unknown symbols, numbers... just past the threshold of typical clothing, there was more ink than not, curving over the muscled trunk of her torso.

she inhaled and exhaled chemicals away from him one more time, soothing her screaming nerves before dropping it in the cup with a quick sizzle. then, the rest came off, and she stood there, still silent, still staring, offering herself to him, and hoping he’d take it with the leadership he might find, with surprise, that a woman so rusty and with such focused, humble experience required.