“Taddy—” (That’s short for Thaddeus) “—I can’t find my—”

“Here.” He holds up one hand, and there’s her shoe, strappy and high-heeled, dangling off one long finger precariously. She breathes relief, glad not for the first time that he uses words thriftily, as though too many can be said at once.

One of his hands tangles in her hair as she leans close (it was already tangledenough) and his sigh whispers down her neck, the breath hot. One, two seconds, and then she’s released to wriggle her foot back into the shoe on her own edge of the bed. Taddy’s funny like that, and her thought process clicks-and-whistles through her teeth softly.

The nickname doesn’t fit him, doesn’t pull quite right over the angles of his face and the jutting bones of his body, but Thaddeus doesn’t fit in her mouth. They make concessions. They ignore what they can and the rest they skim over falteringly because their hands are too rough with calluses to be graceful.

He fingers a bruise on her thigh when she straightens, that damn smile tugging at the corners of his lips like the drawing of a heavy curtain. A whimper slithers over her bottom lip, a whimper which is delicious and terrifying, and he recoils quickly. Perhaps he oughtn’t ask.

“Tomorrow night,” one of them says, or perhaps the other; it is perhaps a question, perhaps a statement. Their companionship is soft, red-mottled like a valentine, together to not be alone, as alone together as otherwise but too stubborn to admit it. They like it. They don’t. Does it matter?

Her hips sway, he leans back, and sun trickles through the yellowing lace of the curtain as glitter (or dust) dances seductively in its brazen fingers. It doesn’t.