What does statuesque mean? It should mean her, standing out on the balcony of our hotel room. In just a pair of black panties, she smokes just outside the sliding door, to keep the smoke detector from wailing. Her back is arched, and nothing about her moves, apart from her lips. She breaths tendrils of beauty up into the night, and while I dread the taste, I’m enchanted by the dissipating swirls.

She looks like marble. It’s not just her pale skin, brushed by the pale halogen lights from the city below, sneaking up to the twentieth floor to caress her. The stars are hiding under the heavy clouds that threaten to weep, so only the angry manmade glows illuminate her.

She looks like marble. She looks hard, immobile.

She looks cold. Her touch would sap the warmth inside. For the moment, all I want is to watch her, bare to the world and uncaring. Pale, naked, and too powerful for the night to touch, to diminish. I want to watch her breath fire.

The clock, the ancient relic, clicks. It draws my attention, a cocked gun, as every digit of 2:59 flips over to 3:00.

I want it to be 3:00 forever.

The door slides open. The nitrogen smell of the coming rain mixes with her nicotine poison. She’s staring at me, and there’s a violence in her eyes, a terrible hunger. I just want to watch her smoke. I have no more need of her cold hands, of the ashy taste of her lips.

She comes no closer, the wrath in her eyes held back by marble of her flesh. They smoulder, those eyes, catching the red of that alarm clock. She stands there, frozen watching me. She is waiting.

I hear the rain drop, the one that hits the small of her back. The one that melts her, that dilutes the anger in her eyes. It saps her hunger, and now she is a supplicant for warmth.

Already, I miss what she was.

What does statuesque mean? It should have meant her.