Mal has noticed that ever since he and Inara started…whatever they had started, she’s stopped wearing three things: makeup, perfume and underwear he can’t remove with his teeth. While the latter is just for practicality’s sake, he’s curious about the lack of warpaint and scent. He’s just as likely to chalk it up to her not needing such fancies to get his attention, but she’d not said a word about it.

He ponders on this as he sits at her vanity, waiting for her to finish up in the shower. There is an array of various jars, bottles and vials neatly lined up in a row in front of the mirror. Mal absently picks them up, one by one and looks at the label. Foundation. Powder. Moisturizer.

The sorts of things he’d expect. He reaches the end of the line and, tucked away so it is almost completely hidden, is a small dark brown bottle with a black lid. Clearly some sort of perfume oil.

Now Mal is more than a little acquainted with how Inara smells. Not because of any fancy smellies, but just how she – the woman – smells. She smells of smoked black tea with honey. He likes smoked black tea with honey. A lot.

So this bottle has him even more curious. What sort of scent would need to be hidden away like that? Was it one that a client asked for special? That she got as a gift?

He squints at the tan label on the bottle. In the dim light of the shuttle, he can make out only one word: Perversion.

Huh. Mal has just killed an entire litter of innocent baby kittens with his curiosity.

He cocks his head to listen if Inara is likely to be done soon in the shower. Nope, water’s still running, mingled with her pretty singing. He likes that she sings in the shower.

He carefully unscrews the bottle, lifts it to his nose and…

Sex floods his head. Not to mention his cock. And not just straight-up missionary either. No, sir, this is sex of the middle-of-the-night-half-dressed-against-a-bulkhead sort. Or possibly of the bent-over-the-catwalk-railing variety. Mal has become intimately acquainted with both sorts over the last few weeks.

Sex and leather and tobacco and rum and all manner of perversions. All in that one bitty bottle. Not unlike that little Drink Me bottle from that story about a lost girl named Alice his Ma used to read to him.

But Inara ain’t no lost little girl, and he now has himself a powerful urge to smell that aptly-named scent on her. Find out for himself just how well smoked black tea and honey mingle with leather, tobacco and rum.

Mal closes his eyes, feeling himself getting harder the more imagining he does as to where on Inara’s body would need that scent.

Nape of the neck, for certain. His favorite place to nip at her tender skin. OK, one of.

Right between the valley of her breasts. Letting them warm the scent. Mal strongly suspects it smells even more perverted warmed up a bit.

Hipbones always have good possibilities. Mal is inordinately fond of Inara’s hipbones.

Perhaps right in the small of her back. Just above that nicely rounded backside.

Or maybe…

Mal can feel himself twitching at that particular notion. Right at the inside tops of her thighs, at the very core of all that smoked black tea with honey.

He is so lost in that delicious thought, he almost does not hear the shower shut off. In another minute, Inara will emerge from the shower all clean.

Inara finds Mal looking at her with a predatory gleam in his eyes. She’s learned over the past few weeks that in addition to having an apparently limitless appetite for bar fights, Mal has other equally endless appetites as well.

Not that she complains, mind.

Nevertheless, she is more than a little startled to see him at almost “full-mast” sitting at her vanity holding up that bottle of perfume oil she’d hidden away.

“Care to explain, Inara.”

In a voice that is gunmetal sheathed in velvet.

“It was…a gift.”

“A gift? Really? Who from, darlin’, cos’ that’s an awful big gift in a teeny little bottle right there.”

She cannot hide. Probably has never been able to, but could not admit it until the dam of want and need and desire had finally burst over the two of them.

“For you. Your birthday. Next week.”

She’s started speaking that way around him. Short staccato sentences. Because it is all so new and she hasn’t yet got the words for it.”

Mal stands up, which only makes him look more dangerous and –damn him to hell – more desirable.

“Well, I ain’t one much for smellies.”

“Uhhmmm….no. For me. To wear for you.”

Mal can feel he is now at full attention.

“Yeah? Well happy gorram birthday to me.”