Cosmetic Synaesthesia

You smell like lipstick again.
I can smell it: there is no doubt.
I can smell it, so I know what colour it is, so I know who you've been with.
What a thing to wake up to: yet again you have taken the sunrise and faded it. You'll have to get up in a minute, and then at least you'll have washed yourself and diluted this contamination, this fresh-blood wound before you kiss me goodbye without talking.
It is hardly there, this smell, fading by the minute like the tingling remains of a snatched embrace at the end of yet another snatched night, but I can still detect the odour, and therefore still detect the colour, like the hue of a lurid scab neutralised by its mingling with a colourless healing powder, just like some other self-cancelling crass mingling I might choose to mention.
It's a cheap smell, the mechanical smell of a job to be done, the incidental smell of something created not to be smelt but to be seen, to attract attention in the semi-dark: a garish slash of little-girl cliché colour for a piece of garish little-girl cliché behaviour in the fumbling night.
But this is a dangerous, contagious game you play: when your blood is spilt - and that may be soon - it will look like someone has tried to bleach it.
And the fact that you do not speak will have no effect. You will try to shrink back into your hermit-crab isolation once more, but it is too late: just like the tip of the lipstick retreats back into its cold cylindrical container, imitating a periscope sinking back into the coning tower of a submarine, we are heading towards our washed-out sunset now, and what we are will shortly sink beneath the waves forever.