It was the way she'd lean in, hair tangled in her hand, thrown over her shoulder so she could twirl it around her fingers, pout firmly in place. It was the flutter of her black-edged eyelashes, throwing a smouldering look at whoever sat across her.

I'd come to learn –we all had, sooner or later- that it didn't really matter who was sitting on the other chair; she'd look at them through smoky eyes full of dark promises and fill their heads with dreams of things to come, dreams with the consistency and permanency of gossamer wings, and all the more tempting because of it.

She was a thing of perilous beauty, a vision in black with dark red lips and darker smiles. She could make you feel like the luckiest man in the world with only a look; for one night, she'd make you King and God.

It was a sort of magic she wove with looks and sighs and the occasional upturn of her full lips. She would never mingle in the dance floor, never had to walk to the bar to get her drinks. The waiters and her admirers kept her well supplied through the night, and she'd just sit there, a table-distance away, and you'd hang on, enchanted, for as long as she deigned to notice you.

She was not a generous queen; one would never know when those dark eyes would alight upon them, and they rarely did visit the same man twice; but that didn't stop us from dancing around her booth like flies drawn to the irresistible light.

She was a thing of shadows and mystery. None of us knew where she went during the daylight hours, and it seemed almost sacrilegious to think of her existing outside of the darkened room, outside of the tight confines of nights where everything was possible.