Six fingers of elfshot bourbon deep, I put on my hat and coat and went to lock up the office. Three in the morning on solstice day, the sputtering illumination of fading cantrips in the tinted glass shades lining the corridor — half of them extinguished, now, until housekeeping comes round tomorrow evening to re-sorcel them. The wavering light danced on the frosted glass of the door, peeling lettering advertising my name and profession, in the written script of a language largely dead.
She was waiting in the corridor, leggy and dangerous; thigh gleaming from the slit in her evening gown, hair in fashionable waves, lips painted sticky, visceral red. She’d probably looked perfectly put together, an hour or so ago; the illusion chipped at the edges by time and tiredness. Eyeshadow smudged, just a little. A slump to her shoulders.
She put a hand to my chest, and wordlessly pushed me against the door. I clenched my hand around the office key, the bite of its teeth into my palm a reminder to keep it at my side, not put it anywhere it couldn’t afford the rent.
She flicked her eyes upward, to make me do the same. Over the door, on one of the light fixtures. Mistletoe. Must have put it there herself.
“A fang-rooted parasite that digs through the tough hide of honest trees and sucks the life out to bear poison fruit,” I said. We’d kissed before; and sometimes, one or other us had even meant it. “Quite the metaphor.”
“I’m not drunk enough to find your cynical act charming,” she said, gripping my necktie.
“I’m not sober enough for it to be an act,” I told her right back.
I thought her eyes gleamed with unshed tears; it might just have been the light, as the fixture over my door flickered out. “Just once,” she said, “can we do without the tough-guy talk? Without the wisecracks?”
I could do almost anything for her except act in my best interests. “Well, if you prefer the silent type,” I said.
She begged me to stop talking with her lips, instead; which worked for a while, stumbling into the elevator, out of the elevator, against the door of the penthouse, then against various walls on the inside of the penthouse; in her sheets.
She’d never have luxury, except as an accessory to someone rich enough to dole it out as the wages of clipped wings and spread legs. I’d never have anything to share with her but worn-through boots and skipped meals. In the morning, one of us would say something to ruin things; one of us always did. Half the time, I’d do it just to break the anticipation. I’d go back to my squalor, and she’d stay on her perch in her gilded cage, with the door forever open, watching each other through it.
For now, I wrote merry solstice with the tip of my tongue, and her hands fisted in my hair over that more saccharine cliché.
