#dk how I accidentally deleted og post whoops

[1800titz]

IF YOU THINK I'M PRETTY | dad's best friend

Up close, he’s a pastiche of a daydream. The kind of face that sticks and lingers. Aged like a fine liquor. The turbid guitar riff you hear from the bathroom. The devil’s hour unspooling across your shoulders when you chase the moon with your feet; the sin you wadded up into a piece of paper to tuck into the cigarette case. Sex. A sandpaper kiss. The scent of gunsmoke. Motor oil across knuckles.

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“I know,” you tell him, blinking. “I know who you are.”

He blinks back at you. Amused. “Do you?”

(No. Undeniably, no.)

You clear your throat when he lets your hand go. “Enough. So. Are you in the… like, special forces, then?”

His eyes linger on you for a little longer. He smiles. Leans in a little closer— you can’t help the way the peach fuzz on the scruff of your neck stands when his breath wades into your hair, against your ear. Can’t help the electricity that rides across your synapses. 

“That’s need-to-know.”

(On WeHeartIt, an older man is calligraphy soused in the rose-tinted lens of Valencia. This whole scandalous endeavor of sleeping with an older man— luxuriant in lyrics and picsart stickers. Pinterest boards. Sleep with your professor; that’s a Melanie song— silver fox is in like bows, and leopard print, and the awkward twee of teenagehood making rebirth.)

You fan the heat that congeals you off with laughter that nearly sounds nervous. Clear your throat again. Take a drink that burns down the back of your throat. Cross your legs a little tighter.

“Right. Secrets.”

(A girl on TikTok came onto your feed discussing how she got into being a sugar baby, what websites to use, how to talk to them— it reminds you of the link your friend sent you last month on the Sprinkle Sprinkle lady; look at her, she knows what she’s doing!)

He hums. The kind of rumble that stems from his chest. With the dearth, you nearly feel it in your bones, rattling the junctures of your joints. This— you’re imagining it. You swallow. 

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you, I reckon,” Harry says. Jokes. It’s wry. Acidic. The kind of dryness you expect off a man of his stature. 

(You always thought it was a little sick. Gross. Lolita-steeped. The out-of-touch Electra pillared on the foundation of a taboo— dad looked the other way in disinterest and tucked his affections behind the cage bars of his bones, so now I try to pick at the lock on yours with my thumb.

Only, you have a wonderful relationship with your father, and the man leaning into you from the corner of the bar— letting his eyes roll across your body and your stupid, muzzy face, limned in shadows off the shoddy bar lightning— is not like that at all.)

He blinks. The eye contact is unrelenting. Almost stifling. You nearly choke on your own spit when the corner of his mouth ticks and he tacks on, “...Wouldn’t want to put down a pretty thing like you.”

(Because Harry is older like secrets and cicatrix. Like a gun in the drawer of a nightstand with a bible. The smoke that lingers off a bonfire. The leaden maelstrom on the horizon of the shore, where the waves are still placidly lapping.  

Riding on that hairline fracture of just enough stay away and come a little closer. Skirting the border, where the head of a palisade overlooks the rift of a bad decision.)