hotel room.

china doll wondered, why such a plain room looked so beautiful tonight. maybe she was just sick of normal beauty.

or maybe it was something else. somebody else. somebody who was so beautiful they lit up wherever they were like a lava lamp, made it glow.

the paint on the walls was the colour of crumpled tissues and the carpet was dull beige but comfortable under her toes. the light was warm and cast cinnamon shadows. these colours reminded her of the smell of champagne.

everywhere she went she romanticised it, made it dangerous and exciting, and a daydream came to her; this place is where psycho girls would stay, who'd cut their hair like monroe and stroke the bed with their knife nails. where they'd scream and bite at the ceiling, trying to be fabulous.

she looked at the cracking wall, the floor where their footprints had been, the tea-candle yellow light. the boy in black on the bed, like an oil-wing butterfly, an ipod in his hand.

no, she thought, this is not the place for a rockstar.

sitting with him was like sitting on snow with her bare thighs, but heated beds always made her feel ill.

she touched the off-white sheets and thought, this is not the place for a normal boy, or a girl like me.

she hooked a headphone in the shell whorl of her ear, and listened with him to fingers thrusting piano keys through the air like a life depended on it, and a girl whose soaring feather voice sang of beauty and hiding and love and falling.

the music in the room that night was shades of brown and cream, subtle and gentle in her ears, on her face, and on her lips-

china doll broke away and escaped to the bathroom, where the light shone soft on the dull tiles and the mirror, where she looked at herself, at her cheekbones under long soft eyelash shadows, at how pretty she felt right then. at her soft pink mouth.

his kiss had surprised her, and she stared at her skin in the mirror for a long time.

she went back to the bedroom when she was convinced that the girl with navajo white flesh and lemon cream hair was really her, and took off her jeans.

she slept through the night in his arms, tangled in the headphone wire and the music that played through it until morning.