✶ ㅤㅤKILLERDAME ㅤㅤ: ㅤshe had the power of inspiring love almost anywhere [ . . . ] seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way through street riots to be home in case she called. family men abandoned sick children to wait in the rain outside her flat. semi-literate builders & bankers sent her sonnet sequences. [ . . . ] she pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers. independent, highly selective, mutually - exclusive writing blog. starring chanteuse dove moreno, an original character established in 2022 ; inspired by the (neo-) noir & featuring fandom-compatible alt verses such as THE BOYS, SONY MARVEL, & STAR WARS. as choreographed by fleur. [ . . . ] DANCING WITH : 0FELIA, CREETUREFEELING, CONVEXING, SOVIETSTRINGS, HEDUNNIT, D-EADEYE ﹠ EMBROSYN, AMERIGASMS ﹠ ELPISKEY ﹠ HOWLINSMOKE.
i. carrd. ii. prompts. iii. aes blog. iv. wanted. v. headcanons. vi. usfw blog.
much going on! i've been enjoying my city hosting the world cup (ofc i went to the game canada lost </3) and then got hit w a family issue. birthday shenanigans are also upcoming and may keep me offline. will be back at some point<3
STIIIIIIILL HERE. alas i am a hot girl and it is summer so i've been lost to the patios + aperol spritzes and currently a godawful flu. keeping an eye on the dash and blowing kisses to u all
RUPERT DOES NOT OFTEN FEEL LIMITED BY PROPRIETY. He is uniquely situated so that behaving poorly often increased his popularity—amongst the countryside residents in general, surely, but particularly amongst the women, which has always mattered to him most.
There's something dull about all of that now. His reputation, his routine. He thought he could be happy doing the same thing until he died. He thought he'd start to feel satisfied when he came home to his big, empty house and his dogs.
Now, he resents the rigidity of customs that compel him to feel ashamed for coveting another man's wife—the requirements of masculinity that berate him for failing to take what he should have taken when he had the chance.
Today, Helen hates him. She is far, far from here due to this fact. Rupert stares at the profoundly unsatisfied Dove and convinces himself that she'd come to hate him, too. That he did them both a favor.
It feels like he cursed them instead.
"I apologize," he offers courteously. Perhaps he shoulders the English weather like Atlas shoulders the sky. Perhaps this has always been his fault.
Rupert steps forward to assist her and convinces his guilty conscience that any man would help any women who needed her cigarette lit this badly.
Given the heat, he's only within arm's length. Their bodies do not touch.
"Let me have a go." He holds his hand up and out, cupped—not unkind. Not timid.
THEIR BODIES DON'T TOUCH, but they don't need to. she feels when rupert enters her orbit all the same. could have identified the moment it happened even with her eyes cast low as they are now, with her lashes pulled down atop them like a black censor bar. her vision locked on the flesh pad of her palm, the heel going pink with rising temperature.
this ability doesn't surprise her because it's been like this for some time. unbearable in this way and so many others. there are memories of him that shift the anatomical location of her heart. when they spend too much time together, when his body drifts too close — not always in the sense of physical nearness, but in the sense of exactness; when he touches down close to the bullseye of her innermost desire, the red bullet point of a deep and inexpressible need — it moves from the central part of her chest to the divot of her throat. thrumming there, relentless, as if to find an escape where the skin is thinnest.
dove can wander for hours with her pointer and middle finger touching idly at the pit there, trying to calm the pulse like a caged bird. it's alright. there there. the door is locked and you are never getting out.
her eyes seem to tremble. dove is dimly aware that must mean there are tears, even though she's really very good at never loosing them. perhaps that's the problem — they're stuck. the vision of rupert swims as though he exists past the horizon — somewhere in that shimmer that occurs when she looks out over the sidewalk in summer, the whole world wobbling with heat. somewhere too far away to touch.
she should say thank you, but she doesn't. there is too much in her throat. the right words might not come out.
atlas knows about weight and momentum, but tantalus knows about temptation.
instead her hand unfurls slowly, the fingers still curled as if held in position too long. she deposits the lighter in his cupped palm at a pace that feels too slow even too her. his hand feels hot under the grazing touch of her fingers, which pull away before she can linger and fix instead on the cigarette suspended between her lips. pinching it steady as though it might hold her in return.
much going on! i've been enjoying my city hosting the world cup (ofc i went to the game canada lost </3) and then got hit w a family issue. birthday shenanigans are also upcoming and may keep me offline. will be back at some point<3
yeah writing smut is fun and all but have you considered writing smut in a setting of deep mood-driving atmosphere, especially an atmosphere/weather event which in a macro sense says something about the actual dynamic of the pair? ykwim because consider it all going on during:
amidst a heatwave with no ac (@ my own soldierdove post)
middle of a lightning storm in a car (thank you challengers) or a sudden flurry/snow storm (thank you the english patient, in a roundabout way)
during a monsoon or summer rain in a gazebo, greenhouse,
amid high wind/gale storm warnings in a little trailer or shelter that rocks with it
during a power outage. particularly in a building/complex (like dove's penthouse) where you can no longer get out because the elevator is down
i just doooo need everyone to know this is some dove ass choreography<3 using her leg as a mic stand live singing some i wanna be loved by you / a guy what takes his time type beat
ON THE CONTRARY, RUPERT HAS ALWAYS LOVED THIS PLACE. Not specifically his house, or the home of this stupid man whose acquaintance he was unfortunate enough to make years ago (and, yes, even more unfortunately, to maintain to this day), but Rutshire itself.
The people are often lovely. Lizzie, for example, as she stands out above all the rest—despite the way he's trapped herself with that awful moron.
And most of the women provide him with some aesthetic pleasure, some intoxicating creature comfort, that he's never been known to resist—even if he has dialed back substantially due to the increasingly prolific (and thus, sensationalized) nature of his role within Thatcher's government.
Rupert, when he's with only his dogs for company, or unable to stomach his reflection in the mirror, tells himself he's only ever done this for some public good. His days of personal glory are long behind him. He does not need the admiration.
However, the spectacles and scandals, to this day, are—
—miserable and ceaseless, actually.
Rupert performs a parody of laughter. His nostrils flare. He dwells on the surface level of her cleverness without breaking its tension—he can't afford to dwell on the implication that she's made herself suffocatingly unhappy with this man.
"Beg pardon?"
Oh! Ice. Of course. Ice'd be lovely, wouldn't it? They're sweltering—as in, the other guests. Dove, by contrast, shimmers.
He checks the refrigerator first. Foolishly. Then, the freezer above it. Being so close to the machinery means its whirring consumes him. There's a bucket in here, which seems a waste of space—particularly when there're only eight or so pieces of ice inside of it. Still, he holds it out to Dove at arm's length.
the proper thing to do would have been to echo rupert and say pardon. but dove is weary and hot and has, frankly, been left a little sore by both those factors and several more in the act of developing. without the mental wherewithal to hold them back, her american expressions — like the people that issue them — tend to but out ahead of everything else.
she turns, assuming he's asking her to explain what she was thinking of. the neutrality of his expression tells her otherwise. dove leans back against the sideboard. it takes a moment for her to accept what's extended, but this is still a better rate than rupert's. he's left what she offered hanging in the air.
"that someone hid a vice in here."
she brandishes a pack found in one of the many infinite and ungainly wooden drawers. in case it's unclear what immoral object she's referencing in this particular room.
dove tilts the bucket toward her and then away again in an instant, replacing it on the sideboard with an exhale that is both deeper and louder than she intends. fingers rub between her brow. what are they to do with a measly handful of ice?
"i don't know how you all do it." momentum is a funny thing. an evening can go measurably well, but with a single misstep the ensuing backslide can feel as though it's undone everything. sisyphus would tell you as much if he could catch his breath.
dove pulls a cigarette from the half-crushed pack and raises it, shaking, to the red of her mouth. it's only the weather, she tells herself. it's the summer, the temperature, the heat on her face, not the burning rush of blood that so often comes before tears.
"it's driving me mad, this heat." the trigger of the lighter clips under her thumb but doesn't catch. she tries again. "i feel sick with it."
she'll be alright once it catches. once the thing flames and she can inhale, ingest, a steadiness that her body is currently dispossessed of. a third and fourth attempt come one after the other, the trigger finger of her thumb at once happy and incompetent. there is no flicker but a white heat climbing her throat.
#ETERKNOWS: MAKWA'S MIXED CANON INTERPRETATION OF PRINCE ADAM [ AKA HE-MAN ] FROM MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. " look, lad. you were given the power of grayskull for a reason: to help others. no one ever said you could use that power to make yourself happy. "
drums fingers. thinking about the milk hare folklore and more importantly that one text post ( link ) about a beautiful woman who promises her hand to whoever can catch her cat (a shapeshifted version of herself)...... supernatural lite/magical realism verse incoming. mayhap
Not on its own. She is so immersed in, so comforted by, so convinced of her own mediocrity that she feels naked without it. Being nearly completely undressed on stage is one thing, especially given the increasingly artistically provocative nature of her performances in Dove's background. Being vulnerable and confused about one's own purpose is another thing entirely.
So, when she's at a bar two blocks away from the club, when she's drinking a house red, when she's wearing her flats and hasn't even had the energy to take off her coat—she's relying on familiar comforts.
Like her inability to affect change in others.
But Dove—not to disparage her—Dove wouldn't have plucked Maryanne out of Fantasy if she didn't have a good reason. Nobody helps anybody for free in this city, on this planet. And it's been so long since she's done anything but combat an intransigent healthcare system and submit to a grueling, degrading routine that, shit, maybe, way back then, in another life, Maryanne Barkan did do something meaningful.
She sips her wine because she's sorry she can't remember what it is she could have possibly done, though. Even Dove's face, her figure, the way she speaks both in the club and beyond it—these things aren't Ginny's.
"If you think there was a debt to repay me," she suggests, not unkindly, "There wasn't. I never thought—ever—that you would owe me."
What was that about nobody helping anybody for free?
HER GAZE IS ON THE TABLE, on the crystal stem she turns atop it, on slow revolutions made in absent gesture. cautiously optimistic, as a gambler plays with his single remaining chip: with the hope that this one will be last the one. the final cost before a windfall that will make everything right and even.
"but there is a debt." she counters, albeit gently. so as to not make it overly argumentative, dove doesn't raise her eyes at the same time. "just not one solely repaid to you, maryanne, but —" she trails, eyes fluttering shut and open again. "to everyone else too. those that i've been able to treat the way i have because you showed how to do it first."
kindness begets kindness. who might dove have been if there hadn't been someone to show her the first instance of it? what empty cycle?
"after my grandmother died, the only people that ever looked out for me were you and sean."
sean, who is in himself a composite of things she could never explain to anyone who didn't grow up the way she and maryanne did. a substitute elder brother and first love, friend, guard dog; a centering point and would-be anchor, had she not learned to let go of him when she did. when you have so few options, so few people worth trusting, the few that remain fuse becomes parts and parcels of everything that is needed.
she looks up through her lashes. this is not so much the signal of provocation that it usually is, but rather something almost like shyness. too timid to look without some form of cover, the way a reserved child may glance at a stranger from behind their mother's skirt.
"you need to know that none of what i've done has been out of some sense of obligation."
a massive and utilitarian mid-century modern, bloom house wasn’t so much a home as it was a hulking glass display case; a shadowbox theater of stone and polished steel. and like any stage, sound traveled. from the firmament of chatter, drenched in smoke and liquor, to the cheerful burble of the fountain in the foyer, everything bottled at the door. pooling through the cracks in a muffled din.
olivia bloom sits on her knees at the feet of dove moreno, haloed by the delicate sprawl of home first aid accoutrements and sterile bright of the overhead. she plays her part with a soft smile. hums a little laugh as she dabs her knee with a cotton ball that blooms pink in the cool light, her other hand curling around the base of her calf.
“I wear many hats,” she demures—all of them, but who was keeping score? she reaches over her thigh, tossing the cotton ball into the waste basket and plucks another from the glass jar beside her.
“you’ll probably have a nasty bruise in the morning, but I think you’ll live,” she says, her shoulders rolling in a soft shrug as she upends the bottom of alcohol to soak the second cotton ball and replaces it on the floor.
"all equally flattering, i'm sure." she drawls. "you'll have to let me borrow one sometime."
not that this particular hat is unfamiliar to her. before she'd synthesized into the woman she was now, dove had been the first-aid kit. a much smaller girl named ginny who had spent the majority of her young life avoiding scrapes and patching up the lost boys who ran headlong into them.
"though i can't say i'd handle a party of this size with quite such... aplomb." there's something about the thought of this amount of people in her home that disquiets her — some sense that even days later she'd never be able to get them all out of the corners and fine cracks. in celebrations dove's preferences tend to the intimate, things denser and more meaningful. a gathering as large as an audience is reserved for work hours.
she nods at olivia's assessment. up close, her knees bare the tiny silver needles of old scars. proof that she'd lived and fell before — or during — the climb to current heights. her face tugs at its innermost points in the press of another alcohol-singed pad, wincing lightly at the sting.
"i suppose i'll have to dig out the knee-high boots."
SOLDIER BOY. SENDER FUCKS RECEIVER DEEP AND FINISHES INSIDE.
L.A. IS LOCKED IN A HEAT DOME. THE CITY ONE GREAT SHIMMERING SOAP BUBBLE, HIGH TEMPERATURES TURNING THE HORIZON AND ALL THE STREETS UNDER IT INTO AN EDGELESS MIRAGE.
inside they are enclosed, boarded up from the world and the heat. her bedroom door is closed the same way the bungalow door is: with finality, as though there's anyone left on the streets to interrupt them. the phone lays fragmented on the floor, yanked from the wall. where it sat once on her bedside table a pool of water now spreads, the runoff of an ice bucket that's long since melted. even the curtains are shuttered, the room burning a dim gold from where the early morning seeps through fabric, the thick ties of the tasseled rope threading the windows like periorbital veins. they look like a pair of burnish snakes in that lighting. bodies gone slick and knotted, limbs fastening tighter and more intricately into a shape that looks gordian in nature.
something that will take violence to split apart.
she pushes at his grip by the forearm, wordless, momentarily argumentative. @amerigasms moves to take the hot under-knee space back in his palm and dove brushes him away again, slipping her arm by his ribcage to curl under and around the shoulder. he has her too deep to talk, so she uses her mouth for all its good for: kissing him deep, shapeless, the fog of their breath hot on everything it touches — neck, chin, jaw.
she looks him in the eye as pulls her legs up for him, knees pulling from under the block of his chest only for her calves to emerge like wings atop his shoulders. back into the half-folded position he wants and then a little further still. binding herself open so that he doesn't have to. see? he understands without speech. what you want i want.
she cries as he adjusts and slips deeper, that beatific sound of pain. his weight now is where she likes it best ⸺ soldered to her from chest to hip, oppressive, taking whatever breath she has left. his forearms bar around her head and dove loses the sight of anything that isn't him.
she often does.
she can feel her feet rising higher and higher in the air with every thrust, an involuntary unhinging of the angle between calf and thigh. the whole of her body trying to chase more — more of his cock, more of the way it makes her shake, more of that ⸺ that ⸺ exactly that ⸺ her head falls back from his shoulder to the pillow and lolls, heavy despite everything else that's left it: thought, reason, decorum. all she has left is,
"ben ⸺"
euphoria.
he fucks that spot without deviating from it; relentless; so deep there's a little cry with every thrust, mindless and blinded-pink. her thighs tremble. she doesn't have to say there anymore because he knows where there is, he knows where everything is, he's found so much inside her that sometimes dove can only think he must have put it there. instead she keeps her legs lifted and puts her fingernails in the skin of his neck to tell him that she needs there so badly she could tear up the bed and the frame with it, the other hand at his hip — what she can take of it, her fingers slipping on slick skin, unable to find purchase until she digs. it would take an unnatural exertion of pressure to break his skin, and that's what she does. what she wants. little red indents where her nails have bit, a series of pinked crescent moons. they make, so far as symbolism goes, particularly apt little tokens: like werewolves, they've turned into something animal.
"please," she has no way of hiding from him. she never has. "please, please⸺" her body shivers with that sudden glaze of something other, a glint of silver rippling across skin. she can see it through the dim slits of her eyes, the body's tangible confession of her euphoria. she loses it as her eyes roll, fluttering into the black. the sound of his fucking her echoes in that dark. wet, brutal. his shoulder curved at her neck like a noose. she comes like that. ripped suddenly into something earth-shattering that deprives her of her senses and puts her instead in a velvet abyss, pleasure so stark it distresses the body. a little death. she shakes from it; bursts from it. becomes a white hot star.
dimly dove is aware of his own orgasm following on the tail of her own, ouroboric. that he's coming still buried deep inside her. that final press of his hips — driving so deep it concaves him into her — touches some sensitive lining inside her that makes all of her jerk, a full-body twitch. even tremoring in the comedown, her legs knock shakily down to his waist and tie behind the back, ankles crossing in a promise. like an animal she tongues salt off his neck and rocks gently, an almost affectionate aid despite its obscenity. milking from him what another woman couldn't.
Warmth answers her preference before words do, not a flare but a steadier thing, a banked heat that deepens under her attention instead of retreating from it. The finger she takes more fully this time draws a visible shift through him, not recoil, never refusal, but a tightening line through his shoulders, a measured breath that grows heavier by a fraction as sensation climbs and settles somewhere low and controlled. There is restraint in it, practised, the kind that suggests not absence of reaction but mastery over it.
His hand remains where it found her, threaded into her hair, fingers adjusting with intention as she moves. The hold firms just enough to acknowledge the change, to cradle the back of her head with a weight that is grounding rather than directive, thumb brushing once along the curve behind her ear in a slow, absent stroke. Encouragement again, though it never tips into urgency. He lets her set the pace, lets her take what she wants and measure him by it.
The ring catches the light as she turns his hand, gold flashing briefly before being swallowed again by the dim between them. At her words, something shifts in his expression, subtle but unmistakable, that faint almost-smile returning. Her claim is heard for what it is, not just preference but possession dressed as suggestion.
"I gathered," he murmurs, voice quieter now, textured by the heat she keeps drawing out of him. His gaze drops to where their hands are joined, to the way her fingers thread through his, to the way she separates one from the rest as if choosing tools with intent rather than whim. "You don't strike me as sentimental."
Her mouth leaves him and the absence of it is immediate, a cooling that does nothing to lessen the impression left behind. He watches the motion, the slow drag away, the gloss she leaves on his skin catching faint light. When her eyes finally lift to meet his, he is already looking, steady and unflinching, as if he had been waiting for that moment more than anything she had just done.
The hand in her hair shifts again, easing its hold but not withdrawing, fingers slipping through the strands in a slower pass, smoothing them back from her face as though uncovering something rather than hiding it. His thumb traces once along her jaw this time, a thoughtful line that pauses just shy of her chin.
"And yet," he adds, tilting his head slightly, studying her with that same measured focus she had turned on him, "you choose the hand that wears it."
The ring remains where it is, heavy on his hand, older than both of them in ways that matter and ways that don't. He does not move to remove it, does not offer or deny, simply lets the space between them hold the possibility.
Heat lingers, coiled and patient, not necessarily demanding resolution.
he's wrong, of course. all she is is sentiment. the same way the mother earth is all hot magma core, but to put your palm on the flat of it would be to assume she's never blushed in her millennia-long life.
it doesn't matter. what she likes that restraint of his: a control that rumbles through the body with every motion and gives it a tangible pulse. if she didn't, she wouldn't be here. every hour they've spent together has been predicated on the friction that accumulates with holding back.
"i did."
dove holds harrison's chin in the splint of her two fingers and sinks down into his lap. her voice a half-octave higher, to a breathiness that he will remember from the movies that once circulated the world, conjoining every country in their admiration. a knife-smear of honey:
"i chose it." i chose you.
that's what teasing is: finding something to stroke that inflames pleasure but doesn't spill it. dove doesn't know how large harrison's cock is, but she knows the size of his ego. that she can fit a hand snugly around it only if she stretches.
her hips roll slowly forward, grinding over him. it's only precise in its indulgence: in the way she pulls, forward and back, in a motion long and slow enough to touch every inch of his length. her pace
"not just from yours, but so many others."
a shoulder rolling in like tide, curling inward, obscuring anything from his view that isn't her — her body, her face hovering overtop his own, the cloud of hair edging his vision. the rounds of her breasts bobbing softly below his chin, brushing softly on the underside of his jaw as she delicately rides his clothed cock, the pace steady and unchanging. she pulls her head to one side, watching him, the expression calm and — perhaps almost, very nearly — sweet.
@killerdame left a message: i can't leave. i tried once. i won't do it again.
the cruelest part of arthur could say something true, which is that leaving is never difficult. he'd know. all it is is leaving, over and over again. but this isn't walking away from a marriage, a death, a life. this is walking away from something that has the chain already around your throat and isn't afraid to pull it tight.
he'd know what it's like, too, to be bound to something more than human. technically he's carrying those chains right now, even if it's no longer pulled tight. it's different to have chosen it the second time around.
and different to run once and get pulled back.
arthur. john's voice is steady, but there's the hum of tension threaded through it, making it sharper at the edges. she means this. she's not saying it desperately. she's saying it like a fact, the face of someone who's said this a thousand times to herself in the mirror. don't treat it flippantly.
what he wants to say but can't: i would've said it like a fact too.
all he can read is her tone, not her face.
"... miss moreno. if i may be a little presumptuous."
be careful.
yes. arthur knows very well. he takes a breath. continues. "it's... i know i may be sitting here before you as a remarkably free man. i promise you that is not entirely the case. i am—bound, in some ways." eyes that do not look sightless but are. an arm and a leg that are not always his. a soul damned over and over again. "and i don't have the ego to think that someone can slip every chain. all i mean is that—i know a good man who would say there's something godly in the effort."
he leans back in his chair. can feel the places where light is streaming between the blinds of his office, throwing strips of slight warmth across the desk.
"i'm not a particularly godly man, mind you. but i'm also not one to argue with a priest's words, at least not on sundays."
a dry smile with the words. with the scarring, arthur can bet it either makes him handsome or a grotesquerie. he's heard both.
HE COULD SAY IT, but he doesn't have to. he's speaking to a woman who has systematically shed every untied object and relationship in her life in the hope of growing thin and feathery enough to slip through the shackles that bind her. but no matter what she's thrown to the side, she is only ever twenty-one grams lighter than she was just a few years ago. twenty-one grams lighter and infinitely lonely.
something godly in the effort, he says, as if that helps. is there anything more religious than eternal suffering?
"than perhaps i should come back tomorrow."
her eyes are low-lidded, the black curl of her lashes hovering like a censor bar. idly, in some form of irritation, the soft round of one calf rubs against the ridgeline of her other shin. in cicadas, this motion produces a song. ironically or otherwise, some believe the liturgy of these insects are songs of the souls who died with something still left to sing.
what do you have yet unsung, dovie?
her eyes turn out the window, where the world is half-shuttered by blinds. the remaining light coming through only in abridged strips.
"i sought you out because i was in need, but if i was mistaken in coming here, than spare my time and yours." she rolls her gaze back to him, to the dark, promising eyes and the track marks lining his face. the scars don't make her flinch. she's seen far worse. they do, as an experienced traveler of pain, make her wonder where he's been. "sermons do me no good, detective. never have."
dove is unwilling to debase herself with an account of all the things she's lost in the leaving. to describe to him, a stranger, how she got here when she's already actively submitting to the humiliation of reporting where it is she stands.
it isn't his business. she's barely allowed it to be hers.
"tell me if i've come to the wrong place. being as it is sunday, i chose a visit with you over a social call to god, mr. lester. perhaps that tells you something as to my hopes."
SHE'S NOT A SLOPPY DRUNK, BUT SHE'S NOT A SLOPPY ANYTHING. Never has been. He can't allow himself to openly admire this about her, of course. Not given their current company, or the ring on her finger, or the man who put it there.
Because it certainly wasn't Rupert who did that.
He smirks but does not interrupt. He's acutely aware of how tightly he's holding onto this wine glass—by the stem, obviously, so as not to warm the wine with his body heat. He's too aware of having a pleasurable drinking experience for that to be allowed.
The glass feels delicate and fragile. His well-groomed fingernails are too blunt to break the skin of his hands. Thankfully.
His eyebrow quirks up, mirroring hers. She's fun to imitate. To tease. He gets away with too much and not nearly enough at the same exact time. She is remarkably cruel to him by the simple fact of her continued existence, her residence in this country.
"I'm a career politician. Unfortunately, only about a quarter of the things that come out of my mouth are truly interesting." People listen to him anyway.
He sighs, as if wistful. "I'm afraid if you're still avoiding the rest of your company in hopes I'll dazzle you, you're going to be disappointed."
HE SIGHS, AND SHE INHALES. it isn't an intentional exchange. they're just in the habit of taking what small things the other has to give.
"mm." she hums a laugh with her teeth still perched on the rim, the edge of her tongue tapping invisibly on the crystal. their eyes are locked. do they have that expression in the part of the world we're in now? i'd eat glass just to⸺ "and isn't that just the problem. you are just waiting to disappoint."
dove shifts, and the length of her gown ripples with it. the feeling of silk on her bare skin is particularly lush after she's been drinking, when the body is equal parts half-numb and overly-carnal. making up for its lack of sensitivity with an overabundance of desire.
"anyway, we've gotten over all that, darling. you've disappointed me, and i've disappointed you, and now we're friends."
as though this is how friendship is assembled. by a deficit. the thing left behind when you forcedly remove all other options.
she takes a long sip and surveys the crowd, a group that is generous to call her company. it's hard to filter her disinterest in joining them from the desire to stay where she is — or, at least, continuing to sift will leave her with the distillation of a truth she'd rather not deal with, and so dove leaves it unprocessed. she turns back to rupert and makes a face, nose wrinkling.
"they won't admit it, but no matter what i do, i think they're always a little bit disappointed by my parties." another sip. "i do believe they're still clinging to the hope that one night i'm going to come popping out of a giant cake."
clad in three barrel-points of chantilly cream, each dollop no larger in diameter than her wedding ring.
