THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN - H.S

11

When Isla crumples into her bed, over sheets tucked tight, edges to corner, her sandals are still on her feet, unshed. They dangle over the edge of the mattress. It entirely slips her mind that she was meant to send Harry a text that she'd gotten home.

You'll text me when you get home.

Safe and sound. She feels something wedged between her molars — seaweed, maybe, and the bitter tang of unease. A faze that washes over her tongue as she prongs it out from its enamelized prison. She's safe and sound, sprawled over linen, and somehow the churning behind her ribcage doesn't simmer away.

She'd been instructed to send a message, actually. It'd been a command. The first time is an accident, but she begins to wonder if she's breaking some unspoken, unagreed upon rule when she airs Harry Realtor's Good morning text the next day, sidling out of bed to haphazardly attempt taming her mane of sleep-mussed hair for the workday.

She thinks, it must stipple more into a morally ambiguous territory, rather than a simple sex-rule-disappointment thing, when she notices his Everything okay? message a few hours post her lunch break... and opts to silence his notifications entirely.

She doesn't know what she's running from. Seeing his texts surge through the aether and light her LED alive makes a raw panic curdle her bloodstream, but she's known for weeks that the leather and chains — an alter ego she'd become well accustomed to — was entwined with the seemingly sweet real estate agent, masquerading.

Metathesiophobia. That's what it's called on the internet. A long word for a throbbing affliction. Harry doesn't text again. Dissecting the root of the discomfort feels like discomfort in and of itself.

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There's a thin partition between girl's-night-woo and stuffing an empty chasm in your chest with agave tequila. It slides down into a cavity that already burns on its own, incinerated muscle in the vale of her décolletage — her own consequences, skin muggy over the surface even under the flits of the fans hanging overhead. Karmic misfortunes. Isla's skin would sear if he was here, but how the vug between her ribs seethes without his touch. Pay the dues. It's a tardy bill tucked under a creaky mattress — there's a smoldering hole burnt through the center, and springs stick from its charred flesh.

Salut.

She takes a swig, sets the glass down, and thumbs at the salt on the rim. The charms on the bangle sway. Miryea wiggles her eyebrows. The void sizzles. The recipe: one part unrequited longing, one part margarita. Isla misses cherries and scorching kisses.

She's moping. Probably, she should find a nice guy — kind eyes burnished in bar lights, twinkling, one button undone under his collarbones. The kind of grin that could get her, half-lidded, to forget all about that wallowing hole. She should let him buy her a drink, smooth the pads of her fingers over his warm knuckles when he passes her something citrusy and strong. Kiss him like there's a mask sealed to his eyes, let him skim her incisors with his tongue. She wouldn't bite. Good girl. Sir for the night. He'd slot between her thighs, but it wouldn't mend that rotting lacuna — a bandaid, skin glued to flesh over sweaty bed sheets.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

Isla looks. Bandaid isn't talking to her. He's tow headed, and leant against the bar, one elbow on the soapstone, wedged in the liminal void between the stools. Miryea does that thing she does, then, that slow, charmingly bemused blink — little old me? She never sleeps with them, but she'll watch them pull their wallets out and pass cash across the bar, then take their drinks with a friendly curl to her mouth. Miryea doesn't even bring her card to the bar.