Femme Fatale
Bitch Willow

What a lot of people didn't see was that there was something oddly...female about Devon.

Oz had it too, in a much more obvious way: dyed hair and painted nails and a reluctance to hide any part of himself. Oz was the one who got called a fag in middle school, and pretty much up til the time he started playing bass, which was just inherently cool enough to divert attention from his questionable sexuality. The jocks still thought he was queer, and far too feminine for them, with small stature and calloused yet oddly pretty hands, but they left him alone.

Devon had it in a much more subversive way, in a way that only a few people noticed. He had it in the coy brush of his eyelashes against his cheeks, and the sensous way he sucked in the smoke of the cigarette he held delicately between two fingers. Devon wasn't feminine in any obvious or exterior way, but only in the way he could make you feel. Devon could touch your shoulder to ask for a light and make you feel like someone in a film noir, like he was draped across a piano and you were wearing a pinstriped suit.

It was the starlet in him, the need to be in the spotlight and in everyone's fantasies.

It was the slut in him; the way he could take a groupie to bed and be gone in the morning, smudged eyeliner and broken promises.

But mostly it was the siren in him, the way he could wrap himself around the microphone, let his voice twine around the words until you were compelled to walk into the sea. He was just inherently a woman, in a way that haunted you at night, until you head was filled with memories of his soft hands and his lips, curved like a cupid's bow and, once, painted darkly with Cordelia's lipstick.

It was easy to ignore, but not when he looked at you.

"How are you doing, Willow?" he asked, voice smooth like butter and deeply, knowingly flirtatious.

"Fine," you said back, and smiled, exposing all your teeth, white between pink, glossed lips.

Devon. Sensuous. Cigarettes.