<div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/zB1pHVO.jpg?1)</div><br/>After the bright light of the desert, it's almost saturnine dark in her living space.  Clean-printed signs mark "WORKSHOP" off to the right, and there's a small counter-space with basic facilities, a pale glow of blue from a sleeping stereo, and a simple metal door-- which she's left ajar-- leading to the room she's in.  Beneath a slow-spinning ceiling fan that casts long slats of shadows along the twelve-foot ceiling, a twin-sized bed rests a foot off the floor, covered only in simple linens and joined by a small, battered nightstand, which itself hosts a handmade lamp crafted from corrugated steel, decorated with nail-punctures across its whole surface in a rustic, floral pattern that spills light through the tiny holes like melancholy stars.<br/><br/>Jackson's looking away into a small dressing mirror, and she's slipped off the jacket and blouse, returning them to their hanger on a simple rack, bearing a small variety of ladies' clothes.  Her bare back is a lovely silhouette, the soft light accentuating the subtle curves of feminine muscle she carries, the stretching and smoothing shadows from her shoulders down to the twin dimples at her bare lower back.  A narrow white band of a bra strap crosses just under her shoulder-blades, across a large, glittering pattern like some kind of primal war-tattoo that follows her spine from mid-back, widening like an arrowhead and branching out in wicked-looking arms, following the arch of her spine all the way to the nape of her neck and disappearing seamlessly under the line of her red hair.  Seamlessly... as if it continued well along her scalp.<br/><br/>She is unzipping her skirt at her left hip, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, and gives no sign of shyness as he enters.  One sculpted leg grazes lightly along the opposing thigh as she scissors her legs and the garment falls from her waist, pooling on the woven red-and-gold rug under her bare feet.  Her ass is pert, a round swell of youthful flesh and muscle at the tops of her thighs, a white triangle of satiny material like a taut sail crossing the swells of tender skin enough to cover, but not conceal, the cleft between those cheeks.  Looking over her shoulder, she seems almost in a trance, her delicate features calm and placid as she regards him.<br/><br/>The 'tattoo', he can easily recognize, is highlighted by glimmering blue nodes-- something electric and alive at once.  There's a machine-like element to that patch of her skin, and it's clear: this is no marking of the flesh-- this is a living machine, a part of her body made alive.<br/><br/>She turns to face him, letting her eyes drink him in with a long, hungry stare.  Magnificent as he is, physically, it's the presence of him-- the otherworldly aspect of him, as if there's some fissure in his heart, or his soul or mind, that is flowing up in a slow, steady current like an undersea vent.  She can't<i>not</i>see it, and somehow baring herself to that energy from him is<i>natural</i>to her.  She wants him to look, wants him to drink her in, just as she wants whatever comes from him now to flow over and through her.  "I'm listening."