Prompt #1: Guilty Pleasures

Resisting is futile. She needed it like she needed air. She would die without it. Alright, alright, even she had to admit that was a tad dramatic. Yet, Effie Trinket needed her guilty pleasure to get away from her life. To escape. She needed to know that beyond the compartments of this speeding train, there was something to feel good about.

If anyone knew, she was ruined.

It's a funny thing guilt. How can something so wrong feel so right? She caught herself thinking about him sometimes. Sometimes it snuck up on her when she least expected it. Sometimes he walked in the room and her min betrayed her, wandering, wondering. What if...

No, there was a reason she felt guilty. There's a reason nobody needed to know.

It was a perfectly normal addiction. There were Capitol shops that sold it. She wasn't quite sure if any District Escorts bought it as well, or any government officials. Everyone had their guilty pleasures she supposed. Fatty foods, drugs, alcohol...

Oh, there she went again. Thinking about him. Perhaps she had TWO guilty pleasures of sorts. One of which was close to her more often than she preferred.

She chided herself for that thought. Obviously there has to be something to it, she has to enjoy his company at least a little bit, or he wouldn't be invading her thoughts.

She wondered about what he looked like under that gruff exterior, hidden away under atrocious clothing. He certainly enjoyed his guilty pleasure, though she doubted he felt any guilt whatsoever. He was gorgeous back in the day. Before the Games, before he had to fight to live.

She had caught sight of his stomach once, when stretching after a long stressful night watching their tributes die. A quick knife to the one, blunt force to the other. Cramped together to long in such a situation, waiting. Again her mind had wandered. He had arched his back, the shirt rising up and she had gulped, not knowing such a heavy drinker could still be so fit. Not chiseled, but not a gut either. She had wondered what he would look like without the horrid vest, sweaty, back arched in ecstasy-

No.

She couldn't think like that. She had since tried to keep those thoughts out of her mind, caking her face with foundation and white powder to keep the heat tinging her cheeks from showing through every time she slipped up.

Once in a while, she couldn't take it though. She'd lock herself away, long after the tributes and that irritating (but intoxicating) man had retreated to their chambers. Wiping away all the makeup, carefully putting away the wig, slipping out of the bright clothing in favour of something more comfortable, only then did Effie Trinket enjoy her guilty pleasure.

She had been getting away with it for years. She never imagined that one night, Haymitch hadn't passed out knife in hand. She hadn't imagined that his nightmares hadn't been of the Games. She hadn't imagined him wandering the halls of the train, somehow stumbling closer to her room. She hadn't, never, not once, not in a thousand years, imagined him plundering into her room to find her pleasuring herself to a picture of him.

Never not once did Effie want Haymitch to find her guilty pleasure was him.