The city stank like a pissed-off alley cat twisted in kush and old sweat, the kind of aroma that seeps beneath your skin and makes you question your life choices. I wandered into a loft gallery where the walls wept cheap white paint, bass thumping like a malnourished heart. In the center stood a woman bare except for chrome rings on every finger and a diamond-bright chain dragging across her collarbone, clutching a newsprint that screamed MONEY KUSH SEX MUSIC ART in jagged block letters. I could see the threads of her desire in the way her knuckles flexed, could taste the tequila still clinging to her lips, could almost feel the damp of last night’s sin on that sheet beneath us.
There was a haze of smoke, heavy and cloying, curling around exposed pipes like a lazy serpent. My nose twitched at the scent of burning herbs and cheap perfume, an intoxicating blend that lodged itself in my brain. Somewhere behind me, a distorted guitar riff buzzed through cracked speakers, each note hammering my eardrums like a tribal summons. I licked my forearm, salt, smoke, and something darker, something primal, and wondered why the world felt so alive when it was on the brink of self-destruction.
She beckoned me closer with a crooked grin, her pupils flecked with neon light. Our thighs pressed together; the rough denim of my jeans ground against her bare skin. I could feel the halo of electricity crackle across the space between us, an inferno of hungry lust and bad decisions. Her mouth was an open invitation: velvet-soft, bitter-sweet, a bouquet of stale whiskey and desperate promises. I answered without thinking, our breaths colliding in a rush of hot air that smelled of last calls and first mistakes.
The night rolled on in fever pitch: fingertips tracing tattoos like clandestine maps, the soft snap of latex gloves somewhere on the edge of perception, a savage howl escaping my throat when she slid something cold and unforgiving against my hip. My heart pounded in my ears, a frantic drumbeat that drowned out everything but the pulse of sin that bound us. In that moment, the world dissolved into pure sensation: taste, touch, sight, sound, scent, all bleeding together in a brutal masterpiece.
In the half-light, she giggled a sound laced with hubris and whispered about the next score, the next high, the next ruinous fling. I felt a familiar tug: the perpetual hustle of adrenaline, the hollow hunger for the next fix, the absurd hubris that convinced me I could outrun gravity. My head spun with reckless delight, caught in the haze of neon and narcotics, as I surrendered to that relentless howl building in my chest, the primal call of a soul gone feral. It was beautiful, it was obscene, and by dawn we’d be ghosts stumbling back to the gutter, richer in sins than we could ever spend.
- JSPC ] Artist of Wanton [
