" The scent had left a red mark on my neck like a boy had been sucking there.
He put his finger on the mark.
"Does it hurt?"
It didn't, but I felt the liquid inside of me as if I'd drunk it down instead of putting it on my skin. Warmth spread through my limbs like the poison might from a scorpion's tail, branching and branching until it was trapped against the edges of my body, pooling in my fingertips and my toes, with nowhere to go.
As the moments passed a definite scent came up through my pores. It began slowly. First from the inside of my arms, and then from my palms. It rose from my legs and then my thighs and then my breasts. Yes. It was coming from everywhere. Fire and jasmine, leather and rose. I was a repository for Louise's life's work, alive, and inside of me.
"Can you smell it?" I asked Gabriel.
He put his face so close to my body I could feel the moisture from his breath.
"I can."
Gabriel and I faced each other on the bed. We sat there for hours, I had no idea either of us possessed that kind of patience. Slow as time the scent ripened and deepened, growing more remote and strange with each passing minute. Hot and dark and sweet, my fragrance was as mesmerizing as looking up and seeing a fire on the moon.
It was not like any type of perfume that I knew but like nature itself, organically beautiful, as if the scent had been made from the inside of my body and hadn't come from the vial at all. As if it had been sitting inside me for years, a wine that had finally found its perfect moment.
Gabriel breathed in this new part of me. He seemed unfocused and unable to stand up or let go of my hands.
"What's it like for you?" I asked him.
He leaned closer, closed his eyes and inhaled.
"Like sweetness," he said, "with a little bit of poison that makes the sweetness, sweeter. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness