Darker than BLACK, November 11/Misaki, burnt offerings (1/2)
More thinky than porny, sorry. I'm also not sure if this is entirely coherent... ^.^; But okay, here goes.
A lone trickle of smoke coiled and twisted its way up to the ceiling, palest gray against off-white. The motion was like a slow, disembodied dance, like a lazy stretch of limbs after a nice work-out, like a soft caress or the gentle press of a smooth body. Beautiful in a way, but most of all surreal. Much like the entire afternoon had been.
Misaki felt sated and drowsy, but not so much that she would drift away into slumber. The sex had been good, but not good enough to override her professional instincts. A cop doesn’t doze off peacefully after having sex with a Contractor.
Being fiercely anti-smoking, Misaki had never been close enough to a burning cigarette for long enough to study the upward drift of the fumes - let alone from below and less than half a bed away from the smoker. So she studied the smoke, and the ring of glowing ash that exuded it, its glow waxing and waning at long, irregular intervals, and the lips that curled around the cigarette to fuel its tiny fire. The thin sheet wrapped around her chest like his lips around the cigarettete, barely a barrier, and for once, the man going by ‘November 11’ completed his renumeration without complaint.
Being fiercely anti-smoking, Misaki would normally have told him to put the filthy thing out, were it not for the fact that there had been far too little ice cubes in their drinks. When she had complained she felt like she was going to melt, it had been entirely metaphorical; for him, they weren’t so sure, and neither of them was the least bit inclined to try it out.
Surreal. All of it. Misaki had grown up beneath the fake sky, had been among Contractors all her working life; she had thought she’d outgrown this stage. Then again...
Her eyes drifted. His skin was pale and the way scars contrasted against his normal tone unfamiliar. And fair is fair, she hadn’t been looking before. What had his skin really mattered when he’d pulled his fingers out of her no longer lukewarm drink and dragged them along her throat, the light in his eyes just strong enough to make the chill linger.
Then again, the sky might have started coming down alltogether that afternoon. The scars were there when she looked, of course, proof that he was just like she’d always known his kind to be, in as great a number as she’d expected of one of his calibre. But he had always liked to pelt little bits of the fake sky at her and watch her splutter and make faces, and today he had completely buried her under it with his pale body, hot and cold in strange alternation.