Poet of the call-girl storm - Kingslay.

[Aurane]

She closes her eyes tight.
She smells smoke and ash, and her eyelids are warm. And her fingers are digging into her brain, like searching for rat’s tails to drag them from their hiding holes – but when she pulls, their little pin-claws scrape across her grey matter, making her nerve endings sing and confusing her further. Smoke and ash. Had he told her?
Lightning cracks the sky into a single, bright piece.
Had he told her? When?

She remembers the fissures of fire in his skin, like hot wounds. Her face is warm. Without realizing, she is leaning into it a bit, into the steam around his body. She is pulled back, by the singeing of her eyelashes, a warning show across the bow – and she obeys that, at least. Maybe he had said it in the quiet moment when she was considering the merits of death by wildfire. Or, when his breath and graveled voice became indecipherable from the chorus of raindrops on her back and hips and on the muddy ground at their feet, and she couldn’t figure out how deep that flame settled under his bones.

“Did I not?” She wonders aloud, her ears flicking back towards the hot squall of breath, and she dare not move them any further.
Is there a punishment for that where he comes from?
That deep-down place of molten metals and stone, acrid and all too hot.

“Kingslay,” she mutters finally. A placation.
She exhales, in great relief, “that was it.”
Of course it was. She holds, breathing slow and steady, (the pressure of his mouth and teeth dent the soft, red place on her neck. Kingslay. It burns for a moment, fire surging in to sear itself black under her skin. Kingslay. The intimation of his power and her foolhardiness.)

“I’ll listen better,” she says, between tight lips, for once in their meeting, hoping for space between them more than anything. “I can be hard to focus when...” She stops, her brows furrowing and gritting her teeth, (don't say it!)
Weakness, gnawing at her belly.
(He will not get the satisfaction of it.)

Hey you, out there on your own
sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me?