Musk Me Not

It smells like nothing at all, until someone leans in and asks why they cannot stop.

You wake in a room you do not recognise, sheets still cool, a window open onto white light. The first thing you notice is the cleanness of it: white musks laid over your skin like laundered linen, soft and slightly soapy, close enough to be mistaken for your own scent. Then the sea. An ambergris accord surfaces through the musk, salty, mineral, faintly sweet, the smell of driftwood that has spent years in the tide. By afternoon the sun has found you. Solar notes bloom on the wrists, warm and hazy, somewhere between a sun-warmed towel and the memory of a beach you were not supposed to be on. It never announces itself. It simply lingers, hour after hour, until the person next to you asks what you are wearing, and you realise you had forgotten you were wearing anything at all.