Dirty

A wonderful antidote to an all-nighter oozing with drunken, addled perversion and debauchery. A fresh, crisp white linen scent: perfectly clean, perfectly breezy.

He doesn't know if Astrid ever truly sleeps. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is heavy, so she does seem to be doing it, yet her features are tense in a way that does not belong in sleep. She is always alert, always ready. But she tries. Perhaps she is clinging to shreds of humanity, perhaps it is only out of habit. Brice watches her and wonders to himself what she dreams of, here in the bed with the strangely clean sheets.

The sweat on her body has dried, and her sweet perfume has faded into the same deceptively clean scent of crisp linen. He feels fooled by it for a moment, before he remembers what she is, what he is, what this is.

He feels sick with himself for not being able to resist her. The things she makes him do, both in bed and against humanity in general, it's twisted and sick. Perverted. Wrong. But she calls to him like a siren, and he needs her. This is not love. Far from it. It's lust, and want, and desire, furious, demanding and raw. She could just as well go to someone else, yet she chooses him, again and again.

He once asked her why she came to him. She had smiled, without warmth, and caressed his cheek with her nail in what would have been an affectionate gesture, had it come from anyone but Astrid. Now it was just her, putting her mark of ownership on him. Brice had pulled back then, in anger, but that night she had sought his bed and he had not protested.

He hates her because she twists him out of shape, away from the angel he was supposed to be. He loves her for exactly the same reason.

Who wants to be one of those fucking little halo-polishers anyway... That's what he asks himself, before he falls asleep. Astrid's innocent scent is sticky and suffocating in his throat.

He dreams that he is drowning.