Daryl's smile is made of gold. It is smooth, cool, heavy, much like a loaded gun, bitter at times but oh-so-meltable across your tongue. You have eaten that smile for breakfast, you have felt it enter your brain with the impact of a .45 and exit through your heart. It has woken you up at 4:00 am in a cold sweat after dominating your dreams; it has kept you awake for days so that you could not sleep, until you grew so deliriously tired that you couldn't distinguish between closing your eyes and opening them. And when you finally slid into unconsciousness from sheer exhaustion, you wore the same smile on your lips.

Daryl's smile plays games. It is rough, hot, teasing, the spark that sets off a chain reaction, licking flames and passion as you immolate. You have pulled that smile around you like a well worn coat; you have quenched your thirst with its vague dark promises. You have worshipped nightly at the temple of that mouth, warm and slick as a new $20, and never left unsatisfied. If you could bottle that smile and sell it you could pay off the car and retire in style, and spend the hot, languid days and the even slower nights drowning yourself in the singular sensuality of his lips.

Daryl's smile tells lies. It is quick, subtle, persuasive, sucking at the soft skin just an inch or so left of your breast bone where he tells you your heart should be. You have plunged into the icy depths of that smile and been lost for days, you have mapped its every curve with your fingertips and forgotten them in the next heartbeat, simply so you could learn them again. It has driven you half mad with hunger; it has sharpened the knives of your jealousy and slid them beneath your fingernails. Your fingers have bled with the effort to transform the smile into sound, because beneath the sharp sweet ache, you hear in its unspoken promises strains of Mozart on an electric guitar, as dark and seductive as the deepest desires of your heart.