PEARL

ELEVEN

TRACK 11
SWING LYNN (SLOWED)
HARMLESS

🚬

MICAH ANGELO awoke (well, mostly) to the scent of fresh morning dew and sex, accompanied by a soft lilac sky and even softer Rowan Emery, sleeping soundly and stark naked in his arms.

Even in his half-conscious and coming down state, Micah knew which pretty sight he preferred.

His mild hangover was batted out of the spotlight by a feeling of luckiness as he watched Rowan sleep mere inches away from him, close enough for Micah to see the blades of grass beneath his cheek sway slightly as he breathed. He felt lucky because only a few months ago, he'd been blacked-out and bleeding on the tarmac outside his house with a broken forearm and burnt hands, after smashing the windshield of a stranger's Ford Cortina and making his mother smash the favourite glass she'd been drinking from on the boards of their porch with a piercing scream.

All because of a newspaper, and not even a good one.

Micah smiled at his own sense of humor, albeit sometimes too dark for most tastes (Ida's almost certainly excluded), before he rubbed his face with both soap-scoured hands and set about trying to gather bits and pieces from the night before. His memories were vague, to say the least, all softened and slowed and separated – memories of Rowan's eyes and sighs, and sky-soft lips, and the ivory arch of his back. Micah roughly remembered his head being between Ro's lunar legs at some pill-dazed point, and Ro's hands dreamily and desirously creeping up his back to gasp and grasp handfuls of his coppery curls in place of the grassy earth beneath them, which was now dripping with sweet-smelling dew.

(Although he'd clearly been grasping some of that, too, because Micah noticed soil under his pearl-white nails.)

What he next noticed was that he – like Ro – was completely naked, not counting the crucifix on his chest that glittered like green eyes in the powdery purple of post-dawn. Wrapped in each other's bare bodies on a bed of twinkling grass, Micah figured that the two of them could've been mistaken for a Renaissance work of art, especially since he thought Rowan looked nothing short of an angel who'd fallen from Heaven and crash-landed in a forest bordering a mental hospital.

Not only Ro warm compared to the morning chill that was making Micah shiver, but he was sheer white, which emphasised the color of the copious kisses Micah had left on his neck and made him quite a heavenly sight. Those kisses were the same color as both the aftermath of sunrise over their heads and Nicole's crumpled lavender dress, lying a good few meters away.

Its owner who was curled onto her side in a fetal position, around what glinted in the gentle morning glow like glass.

Micah presumed that it was the unknown nurse's vodka bottle, but interrupted his own thought with another shiver. Seeing as not only was Ro not wearing his binder but the morning was so cold, Micah managed to get himself more or less to his feet (which was no easy feat, pun probably intended, given that there was still a definite trace of makeshift molly mixed in with the stolen store cupboard alcohol in his system) and grab one of the many clothes strewn around them on the dew-damp grass.

It turned out to be Micah's own t-shirt that he draped over Rowan, making sure to hide both his chest and below his hips from the sky's violet view, and the action made him stir.

Smiling, Micah quickly laid back down and returned his arms to their home around Rowan's waist, then started to slowly kiss from his shoulder all the way down his exposed arm, savoring the scent of wet grass and lemon washing powder lacing his skin that he would bottle in a heartbeat if he could.