Yikes. Two posts in a week.

RachelMasonFan39, thank you so much for your review of my last post - really does make my day when people enjoy reading the weird stuff that comes out of my head. I hope you continue to enjoy!

Notes: This one is AU - everything that happened in the show, happened. It's just the befores and afters that I'll be messing with. I think there maybe has to be another part to this...

*Trigger warning*

underage drinking (UK), sex, prostitution


Musical inspo for this (if anyone is interested) was 'Vagues' by La Femme - listen along if you wish.


Skin of the Night

Boy meets girl. Briefly.


i.

He met her at first in a bar, when he was lost and seeking direction.

She slides onto the stool next to him and her presence demands his attention.

He is low and aimless and self-pitying. However much he resents it, he has no choice but to look at her.

She has a sharp face. A set jaw. Determined. It draws him in. The closer he leans, the more he realises her beauty, the fullness of her lips and the deep darkness of her eyes. There is tiredness there too, a fatigue far older than her youthful years.

"Fancy some company, sir?"

Sober enough to see and just about think clearly, but inebriated enough to speak his mind, he raises a skeptical eyebrow.

"Drink?"

She is likely too young to drink. Not yet eighteen. Too young for him. His eyes dust delicately over the line of her mandible and the way her eyelashes dust her cheeks when she blinks. And he notices every blink. Every breath. Every little move that she makes seems slowed and reverberated in a way that he has never observed in a woman before. An adolescent, still. But if that's what she is, she disguises her inexperience well.

"I'll have what you're having."

The light in the run-down bar is dim. It filters everything. It scrubs her out and paints her over again, softly, with a peachy hue on her skin and dulls the uncomfortable shine of her dress and coat. For the briefest of seconds, his naive preconceptions and expectations are gone.

And he sees an ordinary girl.

"No. Choose."

She is used to being undressed, he muses. Used to being stripped. To being bare. Only not like this. He enjoys the brief moment of eye contact, the few seconds of heat as she gives him narrow, challenging eyes and he holds them. It takes all his strength to do so, for as much as he wants her to believe otherwise, he is not at all used to encounters such as these either.

"Haig. Two fingers. No ice."

He pays for two, with the little money he has left, and from there the evening deliciously spirals. After the two fingers of whisky, he doesn't care so much about stereotypes or who might be watching or if she has ulterior motives. He cares more about meeting her in the doorway to the bathrooms and drinking the fresh taste of the alcohol from her lips, the way she backs herself against the tiled wall, baring her sternum for his teeth to sink into.

With trembling hands he links their fingers, much to her surprise, and leads her out of the bar and towards his dark, empty, soulless flat.

He had been an atheist before that night. She had stripped him of his clothes and his disbeliefs with them. She was not what she had made herself out to be. She was an angel, and he was on his knees. She was not what he had made her out to be, either. She surprises him with her openness, her enthusiasm in surrendering, with no emotional distance or detachment. His hands claw and his teeth and lips ache to devour her and she throws herself to him, clumsily and innocently, the very same fervour in her mouth and her skin and her buzzing fingertips as their bodies press and roll together until they are red raw with passion, and their bones are worn against one anothers. It is quick and hot and frenzied and he anticipates that she will be used to the grime, that in the aftermath her shame will be triggered and she will work quickly to rid herself of it.

She surprises him again.

In the dark hours of the early morning, her nakedness is undulated under the beige sheets of his bed, hips stacked one under the other like the soft curve of a Swiss mountain in summer. She watches him contentedly as he dresses, gathers up her belongings and straightens them at the edge of the bed. He digs deeply into his pockets and gently lays the notes next to them.

Although he wants to tell her she is priceless.

As if she knows, she smiles, "You don't have to do that."

"I'm paying for your name. Please."

The heat from the night previous has smouldered to warmth. The feeling hits him that despite his young years, and despite his skepticism for these sorts of things, he has known her for centuries. In other times, and other lives.

Perhaps all men use over-romanticised ideals such as these to excuse themselves from their sordid dalliances.

"I'm Amanda."

He had met her at a bar, when he was lost and seeking direction. It is always in times like these that he finds her, slipping into the seat next to him, appearing before his eyes like an apparition, turning up in a job that he thought to be his. Perhaps, he ponders, in some fantastical or twisted way, they are just meant to be together.