Bone Music (Burning Girl, #1)

by Christopher Rice

There’s no telling which feature of his she focuses on first, but whichever one it is, it repels her. Maybe it’s his offensively long mouth, which despite its size still doesn’t manage to close entirely over his fat tongue. Together these attributes conspire to make him always look slightly winded, a cruel injustice given that he’s spent his entire adult life in peak physical condition. Maybe it’s his forehead, which rises like a wall toward the sudden flat top of his skull, too flat for his latest hair implants to distract from its startling angularity. And then there are his eyes. They crowd the bridge of his nose so closely, there’s no making them look evenly spaced, no matter how much he has his nose sanded down. And it’s been sanded down plenty, to the point that it now looks both perfect and perfectly out of place, like a piece of statue designed to plug a congenital hole in the center of his face. Maybe she sees only one or two of these things. Maybe she notices all of them at once. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she gives him the brusque, dismissive smile he’s come to expect from women all his life, then returns her attention to her shoe.