He’d fallen into bed with her, choking in a female perfume, catching the sleeves of her dress and yanking them off her shoulders. Her bones were like a bird’s, or the tiny ones holding up ear cartilage or maybe not there at all, like shark blubber. She was all flesh, no bones, that night.

It was in the morning, when she’d tossed him that smile, that he noticed the bones, the solidity of what he did, that he started in bed. Her black hair coursed down the sheets, and he wondered if a strand had crawled beneath his skin and tangled in his guts.

‘Did you have fun?’

He was too drunk that night, she too, but only one of them had developed enough to regret. She was nearly two years younger but he thought she ought to be smarter.

He pulled himself off the bed and stepped onto the carpet. Velvet melted beneath his feet and he looked down to a dress, like the residue of a crime scene, glinting at him.

There a smile flickered from the colour, then the body of her older sister, who had as much as love for him as he did for her. It couldn’t have belonged to her, but borrowed from her sister.

The same sister who stole the place of his original beloved, the same he’s bethrothed to in her absence. That chilling woman, his fiancée. He loathed to marry her, to recite vows on their wedding day, but loathed more to enter his parent’s disapproval.

The only real advantage was that he didn’t need to act proper. He’d already began aging the wine he’d drink the morning of the wedding. If he’s lucky, he’d be drunk the whole fucking thing.

‘Hey?’

He looked back at her, snapped out of it., frothing with questions.

Why would she wear that? Knowing what velvet red implies between them? Did she think he loved her sister in any capacity beyond tolerance? Horrible, horrible girl, and worser him.

‘What?’

‘Are you okay? With this, I mean, I—’

‘This can never happen again.’

Her thin brows skewed, faintly reminding him of a pathetic watercolour doll. ‘But wasn’t last night good for you?’

‘Like that matters.’

His life’s already messed up as it is without bedding his fiancée’s younger sister. His fiancée would grind his bones into a fine powder and smoke a blunt from his ashes.

‘But it does matter to me. For years, I’ve wanted—’

‘You’re nothing like that to me.’ He didn’t want to hear someone he loved as a sister finish a sentence like that. ‘I mean it. I’m sorry. I was wasted and I didn’t mean to take advantage of you. But can you…’ how did he word it in a way that didn’t make him the scum of the Earth?

But she caught on. ‘I won’t tell her.’

‘Thank you. If it’s alright, can you please be on your way? I’ll contact you later.’

She got off the bed as he pulled his foot off the dress. They were the last things he wanted to see.

He sealed himself in the washroom and washed his eyes, the light foundation and hints of blush that brightened his complexion last night, and opened his phone—left on the head of the toilet.

No messages. No scandal outbreak. Just a lone notification from Maman inquiring if he’d be there at the meeting this evening. The world spun on. She was still in his bed.

He wore a bathrobe and only left when he heard the door shut.