snippet saturday
what doesn't kill you makes you weird about intimacy 🫡
He’s transfixed. The gentleman in him knows he ought to avert his eyes, but he indulges regardless, watching as the silk pools on the floor at her feet. She stands bare in the expanse of the room, flushed at her knees and elbows, adorned with freckles aplenty—like flecks of coal soot against storm clouds. Her pulse is insistent, and Heinrix can almost taste the eagerness of its rhythm. He doesn’t recall ever seeing her so vulnerable—at least, not in the waking world. His dreams—they’re different—rampant under the influence of biomancy and supplemented by memories of gloved hands against synskin. But this—? Gold sits flush against white-grey; the warmth of the sun after a rainstorm—a downpour he’s forever grateful to have been caught in. It catches him off guard—the ornate bands of gold that bracket her hips and her knees; the golden rings that adorn her nipples. Her skin is painted with scars both clean and jagged—a vast array of pink and silver. Commorragh. She’s leaner now, too, thanks to their visit to the Dark City. What she’s lost in muscle mass, she makes up for in scars and restored augments. Heinrix swallows down his anger; his guilt. It can wait. That isn’t the reason he’s here.