sugar

I’d had sugar only once, stolen, crude, buried back in the streets where I would meet a knife between my ribs if I so much as glanced the wrong way, a shallow wound if I were lucky enough. The dim lighting behind the small shop was barely enough to discern the large granules broken between my fingers as I let little slivers of the stuff slip onto my tongue, savoring the foreign taste. I didn’t know if it was the novelty or the adrenaline from the adolescent-led raid that had made it taste so damn good -- could be both, was probably both -- but something in my young mind had made me want to cry when the paper bag was empty. I’d licked off my fingers one by one, tilted my head back and tried to catch any remaining morsels, took a long, slow whiff of the sickly saccharine interior before me, unable to bear parting with it so easily, and gingerly folded up the small parcel before tucking it into one of the smaller folds of my worn sash. And I’d long forgotten the taste of it, but the simple memory of having had such a luxury was enough, sometimes, to make me forget about other things on my palate, about salt and ash and blood.

So I think I'm justified, then, when the taste of her lips is so overwhelmingly sweet that I find myself unable to react.

“-- and I’m sorry,” she murmurs, pulling away, and suddenly the dead end street is full and alive again, lights no longer construed in a strange, blurred haze, the bustle of the marketplace just barely avoiding an intimidatingly scarred, ever-scowling mercenary and her beautiful charge. The order is watching, I know -- with it, leagues and leagues of assassins, spies, unsavory informants -- and the order is ensuring that one of its best hired swords is not weak to something so affecting in the field as emotion, as fear, as a few seconds' worth of some impulsive, sheepish kiss from this too genuine, too stutter-prone, too sugared girl. The order knows how to cover all angles of possible betrayal from any and all pursuits, how to eliminate and manipulate its players into blank-eyed, whimpering submission, how to keep its employees meticulously obedient and dependent and perfectly, quietly, willingly in line. How to set snipers and executioners and murderers like wolves on a sap-soft, honey-sweet, dulcet girl like this. How to make examples of us if we would so choose the path of destruction they'd let us waltz upon. Or if I would choose, for once driven by the desire for human comfort instead of human blood, to taste and taste and taste that addicting sugar on her lips again and again until she sank breathless into my arms, laughing in that easy, singsong hum of a voice, teasing in my ear: What took you so long?

And I understand why sugar had been so addictive.