Lyria peered through squinted eyes down into those of her latest lover, her small frame sitting astride his spread body, back arched and skin glistening with sweat. She cocked her head to one side, tapping a Krest from the pack on the nightstand. The cool touch of the filter pressed against her lips, leaving the clove there and pushing the short cropped gold and brown hair from her face; her pincurls falling every which way. He seemed sedate to her, sated, tired from a long night well spent. Good money spent. Looking back, the soldier, only offering his name up as John opened his lips for the second time the whole night.

“So are you going to light it, or just sit there with it hangin’?”

Strangely bothered by the dangling clove, its black paper unusually opaque against Lyria’s exceptionally pale vampire-wannabe skin, John seemed most distracted by its presence. He reached the table with his free right hand, snatching up the Zippo lighter and holding it up. With a snap of his finger, the cap popped off and the flame lit. Lyria leaned forward some, lighting the K’ while watching the strange man’s haunted eyes. Breathing in quickly at first, the flame catching and burning a quarter inch from the clove; Lyria sighed out with accustomed delight. The pungent cough syrup fumes, too rich with cherry sent, blew down on John’s chest in a wave of reddish blue smoke. It billowed, losing her face to him but only eclipsing her eyes.

Without the K’, John knew that this girl probably in her 30s but trapped in the body of a 13 year old girl would begin to slowly go mad from sleep deprivation. The Krests kept the nannites infesting her bloodstream at bay, packed with electron inhibitors, forcing them out through the purging. His eyes focusing again, John watched a bead of sweat run its way from her forehead down her cheek, her neck, her shoulder and down one breast to dangle on the precipital point of her areola. It dropped as if in slow motion, falling quickly toward his chest and parting the wave of smoke in its path. It struck, cool on his burning skin and for a split second he jolted with the impact. The nymph astride his middle nestled down on his pelvic bone, and began to laugh at his reaction to the droplet. Smoke poured from her nostrils up into the air like cherry scented dragon’s fire, head tilted back and enjoying her moment. Each laugh sent a shiver through the muscles of her torso, which like the beads of sweat rode down toward her pelvis, muscles grinding against him. He gasped, and she laughed some more.

With the grace of a dancer, she disengaged from his body and stood up on the rented bed in this seedy Playground motel. John watched Lyria walk away, the practiced walk of a woman three times her age and the old military linkup ports showing on the joints of her arms and trailing up her spine and into her hair. Without ceremony she walked into the bathroom and took the doorknob in hand. She looked back at him, eyes lingering on his much older looking frame. “I’ve gotta take a shit.”

With that, she closed the door and John drifted off, hoping his bag by the bed would still be there when the drugs wore off.