She brushed the long soft strands back from eyes of almost the same color, until she seemed to be all the same. All soft and warm and brown. All perfect and compact, in the camel colored suede of her shoes, and the brushed back cotton fibers of the sweater she wore. Camoflauge the color of hiding and pants and rode low on hips meant to hang back, long limbed arms to sway slight against a dancers body and long fingers to splay against his chest, the dark caramel of his skin, and the silver of her ring flashing, their only light.

She was absorption of thought,
Lost in this moment, then released to it. the murk of London in the foggiest of moments and recanted. Second glancing and again – like heart palpitations and women who drink too much, too fast. Carelessly dropping their bodies like so much dead weight onto bars where beer rolls down and teases them, almost but not quite becoming a part of the scenery.

And she, sitting cozily encompasses beside him. Sipping tonic water and maintaining the sharp intelligence beneath her beautiful façade, as though it were a weapon. And he turning to her, the gun beneath his jacket not his only hardness, and she smiling, reaching for it. a child for a toy, but knowing somehow, feeling her death imminent on his lips. As though she could not reach fast enough.

She opens her eyes in the bed they share and thinks of him there, in that strange smoky place, all opium den and iniquity, the half shared vodka that she never really sipped from, but smeared lipstick on and spit into to smear dna into in case anyone was watching, was testing. And this is the age of the atomic bomb, she had murmured. Seductive, all browns and greens and softness against the usual panorama, Russian hooker black leather, and he had come with her, and in her and she collected him with all the each of a child playing jacks, gathered him into her hand, calculated and scheming as the ball bounced ever higher, the sun glinting off a mounting pile of metal and she

She brushed the long soft strand back from eyes
Of just the same color . . . until she seemed almost non existent
And invisible
To him
and then she disappeared . . .