#laperlina.

[pleasureprince]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a demonic prince,  in possession of a fortune so extravagant as to bring a god of wealth to blush,  must be in want of a worthy indulgence upon which to invest it;  Adelaide is as wretched as she is ravenous,  a mouth with vestigial limbs and organs,  which makes her wicked.  Which makes her his.

“Did you want something,  sweet thing?”  he asks as she nudges his arm to fold herself into his lap.  Shifting his book to the opposite hand to accommodate her perch,  the wild current of her hair obscures his smile as her long legs extend in an elegant sprawl across the chaise. 

“Keep reading,”  @laperlina says, all songbirds-in-springtime innocence turned wrong and rotten.  ”Don't let me distract you.”

The darling little monster has enough audacity to say this with her many-fanged mouth beginning to tease the dark column of his throat,  her hands a roaming,  sinuous tangle in his shirt as she shifts against him.  His spare hand,  deliberate and unhurried,  alights upon her thigh,  a silent, intent weight;  his thumb wanders in circling arcs,  inching upward with an almost scholarly patience that turns the contours of her limb into a map of gratification.

“You couldn’t if you tried,”  he murmurs against the crown of her head,  nose thick with salt and pomegranate perfume and the deeper,  truer note of her beneath it all.  The sound of her breath,  the lovely swan arc of her neck as it lolls back,  the pressure of her teeth,  the twitch of her legs in response to his touch—all are welcome accessories to his reading.  “If anything, I find certain diversions enhance my focus.”

The page turns of its own accord,  a quiet rustle.

[pleasureprince]

@laperlina said:  at a secluded cabin by a dangerously quick river.

The winter sky is pale as bone during the witching hour.  This far north,  it never quite relinquishes that color,  stretched thin by the edges of polar night until darkness becomes a matter of degrees more than hours.  It is that particularly liminal season when time slips by in a dizzying,  drunken sort of daze that lurches and drags until the thaw arrives and the rhythm of the world begins anew.

The new year will begin any day now,  but who’s counting?

Certainly not the river,  which should have frozen weeks ago and,  to its credit,  made a valiant effort;  the water runs too fast and too deep for the freeze to fully take hold,  but the edges are brittle and white with thick frazil ice.

Certainly,  too,  not the cabin—overly grand and dramatic to rightfully be called less than a lodge,  really—atop the hill,  swollen with light and sound and figures unidentifiable through foggy glass that throws gilded bands across the snow.  Whatever revel is taking place inside has carried on well past the point of exhaustion,  unimpeded by the hour or the season.  It shows no sign of ending early.

Certainly least of all the tall,  sculpted figure standing apart from the press of bodies in an ajar doorway leaking music and heat into the argent night.  His coat is shed and his hands ungloved,  dark hair dusted with snow;  he nurses a glass of something deep amber and faintly smoky,  tapping a rhythm that does not match the music against glittering crystal.

He has been standing just so for a while,  now,  watching the water below run black and unbroken.  It seems likely he will go on that way for just a while longer.