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Faulst startled at the sound of the door, a sudden creaking that shook the silent room like a rock skipping over the smooth waters of a lake. She looked up fast enough to see his shadow skip across the far wall of the bedroom and stain her view of the quaint, picturesque western side of Hell. The sky was a bruised purple that bled into the unmoving silhouettes of civilization like poison in already decaying skin.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth and snubbed it on the underside of her palm, where the pinkness of her skin would hide the wound.
Faulst stood then, hands instinctually framing the slit of her legs in a presenting diamond like a parent would frame the image of their child up on the wall. The cigarette butt lay tucked in the flap of her dress, set in place between her skin and the fabric of her clothing. She let it fall to the floor and unceremoniously kicked it underneath the bed with her bare heel.
Faulst fretted briefly with the helm of her itchy blue skirt. She’d dressed young today. Young and innocent and desirable.
She looked up hopefully, plastered on an earnest smile, and made her tone like honey. The same three things as always. “Welcome home, Azāzīl.”
“Yeah…” He barely regarded her as he crossed the length of the room, huffing and puffing about something Faulst caught unnecessary snippets of. He spoke a name and grimaced immediately, as if the word hurt him in some special way.
Black suit, black shoes, and gelled, smoothed back black hair. His regular day to day attire was still all tucked in and straightened to maintain the illusion of orderliness. The straightness in his posture today complimented it well. Faulst had rarely seen him without the ensemble.
Thankfully, he’d a maid to iron his clothes for him. The amount of times she’d been hired to simply clean up a high man’s wardrobe instead of fulfilling him –her actual job– was astonishing. She was not a housekeeper and hadn’t ever had the patience required for such a role.
There was a bright red rose in his suit pocket, sitting snugly in the prime of its life. He set it on the drawer beside the bed. Then, bustling about with his tie in one hand and his belt in the other, the king of Hell slipped past his prostitute and into the bathroom without so much as a word of acknowledgement.
Faulst grit her teeth and forced herself to slip into the bathroom after him, hands immediately reaching for him as if she couldn’t ever bear to part again.
An eagerness that she’d quickly learn to be vital in her line of work guided her hands as they worked their magic. Faulst closed the gap between them and murmured sweet necessities against his jaw the same way his wife had, back during the days when they’d attend private events together. The same way Faulst had practiced in the mirror with a stuffed, fabric dummy for hours on end.
There was an entire mountain of magazines and newspapers and articles of Azāzīl and his wife together in her small apartment room. Hundreds of pictures of the two saved on her phone. Faulst had the mannerisms of that dead woman –God bless– down to a science not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
He was the one who’d asked her to impersonate the stunning woman, anyway. That, as well as zero sex, had been included in his requirements upon hiring her.
Faulst and the general public didn’t know as much of the ex-couple as they thought they did, she'd learned. So many meetings and little conversations of various inportance had gone under the press's radar for years. She soon found that impersonating the queen was rather fun, if albeit challenging in a way that she could handle.
Dabbling loving fingers along the side of his jaw and neckline, Faulst pulled him closer for a kiss. She'd become so very adept at observing the differences in a man before and after she pleasured him, especially if he worked long hours. They wanted something to get their minds off of this cruel world, someone to please their eyes and someone to see before they succumbed to sleep. It seemed the king of Hell himself was no different from the lowly men she was used to sleeping with. Indeed, aside from his title the similarities were mounting.
The rigidness in his posture had an undercurrent of exhaustion to it, which was evident in the way he so blatantly tried to hide it beneath his fatigue. His fingers and the edges of his mouth twitched, both wishing for her body. She saw a slip of the eyes here and there, a flash in those twin pools of lightlessness that indicated he wanted her but knew asking would seem weak. She observed the silent see-sawing in his mind that made his shoulders slump up and down, unsure whether to push her away with his strict authority or pull her closer with his whispering lust.
With the way he was now, tiptoeing between the two like a balance scale, she expected him to cave and press his lips against hers, his desire overriding his pride in the way that it usually did.
However, he pulled away swiftly and left her to stand alone in the lingering scent of his want. It caught Faulst by the neck and bit down hard enough to make her silently gasp.
The warmth she’d managed to capture from him dissolved. Faulst’s voice came out in a whisper, just the way the girls in the movies did it.
“Baby…”
Mock fussing over the buttons on his shirt, Azāzīl inclined his head but did not reply. His mouth quivered with his desperate pleasure, wishing to be set free at last. Instead, he threw his shirt onto the drawer and turned away, mumbling all the while.
Faulst’s tone became sweetly clipped, dripping with a sickeningly plastic concern that she’d come to master after months of living with a housewife who hated her husband. It was time to play the sympathy card. “Did you have a bad day?”
“No.” He pulled his shirt off and rolled his toned shoulderblades at her, teasing like a stripper.
Although her tone was kind, Faulst pursed her lips. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
He didn’t respond.
Faulst sighed softly to herself and strode forward with her hands clenched by her sides. She truly was getting paid to pleasure a man who only wanted her body one day out of the week. And when he did want it, he played hard to get. Goddamn child.
Still, she pressed on. He could kill her and make the public see her death as deserved if he didn’t think she was playing her part as nicely as he wanted it.
The thought didn’t help much.
She came up behind him, wrapped her arms around his solid, unclothed frame, and whispered a tentative, pleading “Azāzīl?” into his ear. He stiffened as Faulst hugged him desperately, willing her body to pull against his like dead weight and make it seem like she couldn’t hold herself up without his help. The illusion of a helpless princess –completely dependent, worth little more than her body and her warmth– worked its way into Faulst’s mind, and bloody God did it work.
His breathing hitched ever so slightly. Then, he suddenly swept her into his arms with little to no effort at all, and ferally mashed his face against hers. Possessive, seeking fingers gripped the curving valley of her hips, pulling closer, closer, closer still.
Faulst uttered a single little gasp against his lips for good measure and cradled herself into his chest, his warm body, and everything that was him. His teeth threatened to cut open her mouth with the way they pushed into her.
Azāzīl briefly pulled away to breathe, mumbled something incoherent, and craned his neck to lap at the smooth skin over her collarbone like a kitten would to a bowl of milk. His tongue was rough and sandpaper-like, with lips thin and unworried of how much he was drooling over her.
He pulled her up into his arms so that her legs dangled from the cold ground.
And in an instant, Faulst lay against the cold sheets, panting and letting breathless moans slip past like his loving her was exerting in any way. The bed was a firm thing, neither all-encompassing like it’d been last night nor truly as cold as a stranger when Azāzīl had first slept with her. This, too, was frequently changed and tended to by the maid.
Faulst couldn’t remember her name at the moment, but she did remember the way the maid would look at her. She had the sort of eyes that’d take the cigarette out of your mouth and firmly but kindly tell you to stop trying to kill yourself slowly, even though it was what everyone was doing and the government itself came very close to outright encouraging it.
She had the kind of eyes that cared.
Azāzīl grabbed her left hand and intertwined their fingers so hard their knuckles turned white. Faulst twisted and wriggled beneath him when he slipped a hand in her dress and gripped her left nipple. There was a look in his wet eyes that said he wouldn’t mind suckling it any day of the week
And he waits, she thought, staring up at the ceiling and mewling idly as he groped her, he waits for it to boil up and explode in his face before deciding to do anything about it.
He dragged his dripping tongue along the front of her chest with a sincerity reserved for lovers or deeply intimate couples, not between a prostitute and the man that was paying her. Faulst shuddered when he muttered something against her breast, deep and sensitive. It was the same name he’d uttered and visibly hurt himself over at the mere sound of only minutes beforehand. He said it again.
And God. She realized that he was crying softly now. It wasn’t his spit that dripped down the valley between her breasts, but tears.
“Azāzīl–...”
“Stop talking.” His tone remained rock hard, thick enough to stop a bullet. His hands were merciless in their actions and gestures. He remained as unmoving as a boulder. But his eyes wept so deeply that Faulst began to feel ashamed of herself for doing her job.
Faulst shut up, momentarily forgetting where she was. Right. Yes. There was a man on top of her, kissing her so hard she gasped for breath whenever he pulled away and gripping her hand so tightly it was starting to get uncomfortable. She could almost feel the bruises already, and the inconvenient aches that would come with the rise of the sun the very next morning. If Azāzīl wanted her until the morning, of course.
All sense of private intimacy was gone. Azāzīl came down upon her for another, needier kiss, dripping with sweat and spit and all the itty, bitty griminess of a man in desperate need of some loving. Azāzīl sobbed freely as he straddled her beneath him with his legs, biting down on her neck and making her begin to ache the same way he did. For the loss of his wife and the part of his life that followed.
His tears plopped down onto her once clean skin and dress, both wrinkled now. He seemed not to notice the wild heartbreak in his actions the same way that Faulst did, the sole subject of his grieving abuse as she was.
He wasn’t even loving her with love anymore. This thing that instructed his hands to touch her skin sickly shades of red and purple was grief in its heaviest stage.
She felt like a ribbon, with this man’s aggressive love the expectant hands that unfurled her and tossed her aside to reveal the present beneath. It was like fabric and a knife. He was shredding her, cut by seaming cut, with a love he’d held back all this time. Just because she’d reminded him of his wife so much to the point of coming too close to breaking him entirely.
Could she really blame him, though?
“I love you.”
The room was a blur of spinning black splotches, angular lines of violet neon light, and white sheets stained gray with shadows. Faulst turned her head, eyes bleary and body broken. Drool streamed down one side of her gaping mouth.
Her head lay against a pillow, and Azāzīl lay on top of her, breathing down her neck. The bite marks on her shoulders felt like such excruciating tender spots that she visibly winced when Azāzīl bent down and began kissing the wounds he’d inflicted onto her.
He dragged slimy, wet fingers along the gradual slope of her arm like a snail’s trail. She shivered again, imagining it was his saliva. Or hers, or a deluded mix of the two. A burning sensation crept up the underside of her palm when the liquid coldness at the very tip of his finger lingered longer than it should on the circular spot where she’d burned herself.
For a time, the only sound was the raggedy in and out of her breathing. Her dress was a smug of dark blue by the very edge of the bed. Azāzīl’s suit lay on the drawer, neck and wrist cuffs fully undone. She couldn’t remember when they’d both stripped.
She couldn’t remember much of anything that happened directly after he’d begun to cry. It seemed like the tears had started falling, and their little routine had been over.
Azāzīl settled himself on her, bare chest against bare chest. There was not an inch of her body that he did not touch with his. With legs that pinned her own against the sheets like he expected her to run if he loosened up even a little bit, he murmured the words against her lips again. Louder.
“I love you.” She looked up at him. Sadness laced his shadow-ridden eyes like a drug. There was enough in there to have him overdose.
“And I was a fool,” he said, “for ever thinking you’d left me.”
Maybe that’s what he would have wanted. Multiple pills, a few minutes of moving colors and blossoming shapes, and then death. But they couldn’t die, no. This was Hell, and he was the fucking Devil himself.
And Faulst was a fucking whore.
“Call me a fool.”
When Faulst didn’t reply, he began to repeat the words like a chant again, and again, and again, until she grew so sick of the words she swore she’d vomit. Her chest ached so bad, and she could barely feel her hands, which he still held onto like a lifeline. If she had blood, it’d have been pulsing and pushing against her flesh like a child in the womb by now.
After months of sleeping with him, she’d never known him to hold on so tight, nor for so long. Had he ever let go? Had she ever been anywhere but by his side?
I want to leave, she thought idly, whispering in a vast, empty room that could care less about her or her kind. And then the words turned to a shout so loud she flinched, rocking against Azāzīl’s unmovable body like a leaf blowing against a window. Goosebumps riddled her skin like landmines.
He felt it and finally went quiet, but made no move to help. The rings in his eyes had shifted from their pale yellow hue to a saner shade of orange. “I love you.”
Faulst’s lips finally parted, and she uttered simply, “I know.”
He smiled sadly.
Swallowing, Faulst managed to capture her voice again, though it came out strained and exhausted beyond belief. "Did I do something wrong?"
"Of course not." His answer surprised her. "You played your part right, Faulst. That was all I'd asked of you."
"You asked of me to love you, too."
"And did you?"
Faulst had no answer. Azāzīl turned away, but kept a hand on her bare arm. He was still afraid.
Azāzīl had never loved her this way, with such... feral passion. He’d always been distant, even when she knew that he needed her beside him, on him, in him, however and whenever he wanted it. They’d dance a slow, leisurely tango, one where she’d almost always be the one leading, encouraging him to dominate her but always being let down.
He would kiss her hesitantly, the movement halting and predictable. He would glide around her like a child would a suspicious-looking person. He would hold her like one would an attractive, expensive, and altogether brittle vase. Like he was afraid she’d break in his arms if he even pressed just a little bit over what she could handle.
Though doing this seemed to soothe his nerves, it’d never been enough to satiate himself.
He needed to feel something other than the need to be cautious. He needed to feel the qualms of love in a place where his mortal lover had already departed. He needed to feel the need to hold himself back, lest he go and do something unforgiveable.
But it seemed like he didn’t care about tiptoeing around things anymore. His valuable vase had broken because he'd tripped on a rock and accidentally let it fall out of his hands.
They said nothing more. Azāzīl got up, dressed himself modestly, and left the room. His gait was heavy.
The maid's voice echoed outside of the room, and his own soon followed. They spoke easily, like nothing had even happened. Like they were going for a night stroll together, as good colleagues with nothing to hide from each other.
The poor woman couldn't be blamed, though. She hadn't known, hadn't seen, hadn't stopped and ever considered the possibly of the Devil breaking under the pressure of grief and bringing someone down with him.
In a way, Faulst was glad the maid didn't know. If she received the lady's soft kindness in any sort of dosage, she feared that she'd break down and cry.
She wanted to now, but stopped herself before she could. She would release herself when the walls around her didn't reek of grief, when she was in her own bedroom accompanied by nobody except her reflection in the mirror.
When she was far, far away from the Devil and everything and one that he'd corrupted with his mere presence.
Knees pulled up to her chest, Faulst watched the sun melt down into the silhouette of a long dead humanity and temporarily disappear. The rose on the drawer sat alongside her, a spark of color amidst the dark. It shriveled and wilted when the first light of day finally came.