It is the sun that wakes her, slanting across her face through a crack in the curtains. Smog hangs low in the sky – she still doubts the stories of a blue sky – the light that filters through is weak, watery and anaemic. It manages, miraculously, to be enough to wake her. And somehow cheerful, as though the bravery on the part of the sun, just in rising is something to celebrate. Shilo can only see a sliver of sky, a smear of cloud in variants of grey. For a moment of whimsy she imagines the world outside her home - her sometime prison and slash or sanctuary – is a monochrome silver. Like an old movie of dames who spell trouble with a 'T' – capitalized like the 'G' of a God – or alternately "H-I-P-S". Dames with painted lips and silver whiskey eyes. One the blue and yellow damask of the wall paper assures Shilo that she is confined in a world separate from the fedora and piano bar silver screen beyond her curtains.

She consumes herself in this flight of fancy, tracing heavenward on a gun moll's cigarette, smoking gun, because she isn't ready just yet to deal with here and now. She is avoiding – because she cannot likely will not ignore – the press of a heavy arm on her waist, hand tucked up under the edge of her dress which has ridden up, legs for days up around her ribs. His fingers are rough with calluses and they curl on her skin, soft on her stomach. Silk and steel. There is a liquid warm on her skin, itching and contracting on the brittle edges of her bones. Her ribcage has tightened, bound in, corseted in with the improbably shiver of something not unlike fear. The feel is so deep, so burrowed into the flesh of her that she fears to think to hard on it, she knows that it will ooze away from her.

He is moving though, coming back to life – he sleeps like the dead in a frightening, fitting, all together disconcerting way – in parts. And he begins with his mouth, a wet gasping of breath against her throat. He burrows against her as if into her hair. Which is lying on the floor beside the bed; it makes new life for late 19th early 20th century ideas of a woman's hair as the metaphoric dual of her devotion to her man slash sexual slavery. The same ideas that flappers laughed at - sneered at, spit at - knocked back a tumbler of moonshine and hacked away their hair. Cropped locks, short skirts, sexual freedom. The moment he comes back to real awareness is the tightening of a spring, the cock of a gun.

The elastic between them stretches, he pulls back and she sees how far she can stretch it but gives, turns with him before it snaps. She is on her back. He is over her, hovering with zydrate eyes once more. His hand flexes on her stomach and he is graceless, wild with a toss of his parti-coloured mane. He smoothes his palm low on her flesh and sets her wriggling. His laughter is breathless, popped collar trench coat and he tips his head with the force of it.

"Fuck, kid," he hesitates then, cackles again like the crack of thunder, like it was a dark and stormy "well I guess we did."

"No," his laughter is bottled, stoppered in his throat, humor startled out of him by impossibly reality. She nods at his clothes, belt buckled, shirt rumpled but – you know – still on him. He makes a soft sound in this throat, a soft realization that puzzles him and, simultaneously, amuses him. His head cocks. A rainbow lion confused by his prey. She has done something he did not expect and she does it again, "disappointed?"

She is joking. She is expecting joking in return. A sneer and dancing eyes when he teases her, pushes the line she's still too much ingénue to be comfortable with. He gives her hard honesty, hangover pounding at his eyes it's all he's got for her.

"Yes," the glow in his eyes flutters, a TV losing signal. The bullet is in the chamber, the finger is on the trigger. They're playing it lethal here, "I am too old for this shit. Too fucking honest."

"Yeah," her fingers find his face; track it like she's blind. Like she tastes with the pads of her fingers. His brow furrows under her touch and she traces his manifold wrinkles. He leans in, leans close. The pillows dent where he braces himself against them, over her.

"You're wearing my lipstick," he flexes a finger on the trigger. Bluffs aggressively, lets a hand up so he can brush his thumb across the curve of her mouth. He rubs his thumb and for finger together, as though lipstick has come away, as though he is testing the wax of it. He holds there, hangs on the edge of a moment.

"Second hand," the gun fires and it is deafening silent. She squeezes the trigger. The gun kicks, rattles her bones, rattles her teeth, leaves her rattled. Like his eyes. She can smell the tang of gun smoke on his breath. Or maybe that's morning breath but his lips are on her and she doesn't give a fuck. She feels his hands everywhere and the dress comes off in a rush of cotton. Her skin slides against his bare chest – when did that happen? The question comes and goes in the time it takes her to pant for breath at the curve of his throat – and her black cotton bra seems childish. His fingers trail the underwire, linger with it on.

The look he gives her is a three ring circus, is all showman. Graverobber's eyes are bright, daring her. The next move is hers, for all that he is ringmaster in this moment, a mask, he is subtly and simultaneously a man many years her senior. He is giving her an out. Last stop before too far gone. Last chance. She lets if fly passed, curls her fingers at the horns of his belt buckle.

God sends her a sign in tarnished chrome: this way leads to sin, Shilo Wallace, this way leads to Hell. Satan is laughing in the rumbling lion's purr of Graverobber's laugh. Sin and salvation are abstracts she has no mind for just now. The blood is anywhere but her brain and she's oxygen starved. She tugs his belt out of his pants, curls her fingers into skin warmed leather.

Naked he is – inexplicably and frustratingly – less naked. He is less bare. He knows his power here and he moves with the muscles of a hunting cat. Goes primitive on her. He feeds with a wet mouth of kisses, makes the skin of her stomach jump under his lips.

He is surprisingly gentle with her, considerate, giving, thoughtful, Harlequin romance adjective goes here. She is startled a hundred times over by him and yet not. Because she catches glimpses of the man under the Graverobber. Afterwards he lies with his head on her stomach, one little hand held in both of his. He messes with her fingers. He fidgets. He is beast caged.

"You can go, you know," her voice comes rumbling, screamed raw and it makes him laugh, turn and rub his cheek on her stomach. He looks up the naked line of her and his smile is all Graverobber, all Dick Tracey and smug. His mouth slides a wet line on her stomach and for a second she thinks he'll stay. Watching him dress is like watching him put on his skin, put on his mask. She is reminded viscerally of the Pavi and wants to have a bit of a vomit. Sometimes she dreams he wears her mother's face and wakes up sweating.

Graverobber hesitates in the doorway, tossing her that lopsided smile of his and it is enough to shake her from her maudlin thoughts. He leans against her door, one foot cocked up against the wood, spine bowed. He is half whore, half mobster and it works on him. His knuckle bumps the wall and he dance step turns out of the room.

"Kid," he is almost leaving, tensed to take that first step away but making time, "I'll be back. You know that."

He doesn't vocalize the modifying, questioning "right?" because he doesn't have to. She knows now. The room echoes with just one body and she drapes an exhausted by it all hand across her eyes. Things are not going to be getting simple any time soon.