Thursday, March 4, 2010

The power of smell

One of the reasons I like the end of the day is collapsing in bed. Even if nothing happens in bed but sleep, I love the familiar texture of the sheets, the sense of relief as you put your body down, and the smell.

There's nothing better than the smell of clean sheets, but the smell of "gently-used" sheets can be comforting. I don't mean anything raunchy, but your partner's pillow tends to smell like that person, or maybe you smell the perfume you wore the day before still left behind.

Last night before going to bed, I imagined the scene in my third book (now remember, I'm working on book two) where one of the main characters disappears without a trace. I contemplated what his wife must have felt when faced with their bed at night.

And this is what I wrote:

"She rolled to his side of the bed, her face buried in his pillow, wallowing in the familiar scent of him that seemed so distant since his disappearance. Fruity yet heavy with jasmine like his Chanel cologne, she clamped her eyes tight as she tried to remember the name... Her eyes ached despite closing them. Two weeks, she thought, two weeks without word of him and everything had disintegrated.

She finally understood how it hurt to be “left.”

She finally understood why he resented her for doing it to him all those years ago.

She flipped onto her side, the heady cologne smell fading and mixing with the aroma of his body, not the pure saltiness of sweat and the muskiness that accompanies it, but the lingering something masculine... because she had wrapped herself in their sheets after all... that something not quite male or female that hung in the room after...

The heat exploded in her face. How could a woman her age blush at the thought... The warmth spread through her body and she hugged her legs to her chest to ignore it.

Our bed smells like us, she thought, like sex."

So what does love smell like to you?

1 comment:

  1. You have it right. That sweet oder of just after, the one that lingers in the air for a while. The long term smell of a couples room the premates everything.
    God I miss that.
    D

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