Jade

"It's a nightmare dreaming about you, Fang."

Jade leaned across the balcony, speaking down to him from the shadows as the burning sunset of nearby forest fires spilled through the skylight. It was ominous light, vaguely undulating with the distance smoke, and shone across Jade with all the wrong intensities.

"Yeah?" Fang asked, taking a long swig from the mouth of his beer. "You think so?"

Jade was silent.

The distant sound of a train horn filled the quiet space as Fang stared up at Jade. She wasn't very pretty in this shade of red and he guessed he wasn't either. Maybe they just weren't pretty people. Maybe there was an ugliness inside them that they couldn't hide.

"I'm going to lose you if you don't start taking care of yourself," she said accusatorily. "And all you do is joke. Bastard."

"What am I supposed to do?"

He was loud. Far too loud. His voice echoed off the high rafters and pinged off the glass. It wasn't what he meant. Was it?

Jade huffed and lit up a cigarette. The flames flickered against the warm tan of her Spanish skin and caught the elegant hook of her nose. Now she was pretty. Fang didn't know if it was the sin of the cigarette between her lips or just his own guilt. Her dark brown eyes jumped from the flaring embers on the butt of her cigarette down to Fang. Smoke piled into the air and caught the rays of crimson light.

"I'm worth more than you," she purred.

"Yeah and your art is shit without me," he bit back, leaning a hand on the back of the couch. "Or don't you remember what it was like before you had a live-in model?"

Jade flicked ash down in front of him. Angry.

"I'm not just a piece of ass," Fang snapped, angrier than he meant to be. "I have more value than how I looked propped up and posed for you."

Jade tongued the inside of her cheek like she always did before laying into him. This time though, she put out her cigarette on the metal railing and sneered down at him as though this was all his fault.

"What am I to you? Some woman or artist?" Jade asked. "Because if you cared at all about my artistry, you'd take yourself a little more seriously. So which is it?"

Fang stared up at her for several moments, weighing every decision he'd ever made to bring him to this moment before coming to the reluctant realization that he'd made a fatal error years and years ago thinking Jade was someone special.

"A bitch," he said with a soft laugh. "You're a bitch."