It burned as Nan trailed her finger along one of the red lines carved on my chest, a squiggly one running the full length from collarbone to navel, likely to be the first one drawn before her mind and hand had steadied. An icy sensation shot through me, not painful per say, more akin to a body stuck in a perpetual gasping for breath. She was mesmerized by her work, cuts of varying length and depth crisscrossing my torso like a spastic attempt at drawing up a chessboard.
“You said you'd wanted to try it,” she purred, affectionately apologetic. Her voice was a soft moan—body interlocked with mine. “Does it hurt?”
Stopping at one of the wider gashes where the blood hadn't quite settled and coagulated yet, she forced the skin flaps to part, pushed the tip of her index finger in until it struck bone. My eyes rolled backwards, back arched.
“Holy hell,” I managed to squeeze out, catching a glimpse of the moon looming overhead before the sensation took over. The poem had been a catastrophe on the one end and a self-fulfilling prophecy on the other. I'd sketched it up along the lines of servitude, of worship, of straying from one's master, of willingness to accept the amplitude of whatever example she wanted to make of me. And it wasn't smutty or filthy, not outright. Laced with innuendos, sure. Nothing that would stick in court. I’d set her up on the floor, lit candles all around the apartment, and upon reading it out loud to her, ceremoniously, doing my damndest to get back into her favor, I did manage to make a dent in the dam keeping us apart. But the lover's embrace expected came veiled under layers of fury. It still hadn’t quite settled in, what ensued. Searing pain erased all track of time, and I was struggling to catch up. It was night, a cool and dry night. We were slithered around each other on a mattress pulled out onto the balcony, coming back down from a high I’d never before touched, and probably never wanted to touch ever again. Sporadic engines ripped revving through the night at a distance, seagulls murmuring, colluding and plotting the demise of time itself.
It was the self-satisfied manner of how I delivered the poem, she said, that alluded to my true feelings for her worth. The words chosen hinted that she could be bought, that my atrocity could be erased from memory by the wigglings of a serpent tongue. My preparations for failure were meager, but I did refrain from mentioning Teddy’s name, as if doing so would summon him into the living room and re-enact the farce anew. Her rage steamed out with increasing intensity, and with my own panic mounting over the grim outlook of successfully reconnecting our wires, I did what any cretin would in the face of terminal danger. On the approach to hug her, to tell her that my heart was bleeding for her, for what I had inflicted when abandoning her in that grand hour marked for us and us alone, she slapped me. Rather hard. The slap itself wasn’t a novelty—a bedside manner found early in our escapades—but she’d never hit me outside of naked context. It caught me off guard, sobered me up instantly. When she launched the second swing, fist closed, I stopped her midair, pulled her close and spun her around. And like that, we were kino. All the pent up energy found its outlet, and in my mind and body we were riding a powerful wave of reconciliation, that is until she drew a knife from the bedside cupboard. Mid-ride, she put one hand on my throat, pressed down, fondled around in the drawer with the other. I didn’t realize what was going on before feeling the sharp edge replacing the chokehold, scraping at the skin, threatening to cut my head clean off and end me. She laughed demonically, intensified her girations. Fear coursed through me; raw, primordial fear, but backing out was not an option so I pushed harder, played along. Then there was the slashing. A jolting, slow zigzag, deep enough for blood to seep out instant. I was disassociating, unable to grasp if it was real or not, and the pain felt numbing, dragging me farther away from any capability to make it stop. Out of all the strokes that followed, one woke me up, made me regain my senses. The gorge where her finger currently resided, the deepest cut. In pure animal survival instinct I wrestled the knife from her and almost punched her, but the end-goal was near. This was exactly what the poem had foretold. With blood dripping down on her chest, we finished in a burning, sensational orgasm. It’s a slippery slope, introducing violence in sex. One has a climax, and the other does not. For the first time in our relationship, I felt very small.
”Don't ever leave me Maki,” she said as the finger shlopped out of me, her multicolored face barely visible in the looming dawn. Deer-eyes, tear-eyes held me in place as I slipped back down from the orgasmic pain-trip. ”It's the worst thing I can imagine.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
If there were words to express what her shifted image awoke in me, I would've told her. The madness in bed, the crossing over into a place that had felt dark and terrible, dissipated at once, melted away like a phantasmal glacier that had never been. She was being fully honest, lips parting, trembling slightly. The toll of passage had been paid, gates opened.
”I don't want to feel like that ever again,” she continued. “You set me aside, even though I know he’s your friend and all. But you did. You put me second. And you’ve never put me second. And that scares me, that you’re gonna start moving away from me.”
“You’re a weird creature,” I whispered before trying to kiss her. She parried, nestled her nose into my armpit.
“I know you,” she said, muffled from the depths of my pit. “I’m worried that Teddy will devour you. You’ll make him your project and forget all about me until he’s fixed because you don’t know how to stop once you lock on. You always burn the candle full fire. But what if he can’t be fixed? What if he’s already broken beyond fixing?”
She spoke slowly, ponderously, adlibbing on raw emotion, letting the voice within guide her. I stroked her soft hair. She rubbed her face on my shoulder, sniffled, went back into hiding.
“By that logic you should be reassured? No? I don’t stop. I never stop when the gain is maximized, when the peaks are high. And you, you’re the main surge hooked straight into my heart. How could I ever drift away from you? It’s effectively sucicide. Throwing everything down the well. Life without you would be colorless, it’s so horrible I can’t even approach it in thought.”
From the crest of a pec, her damp eye rose, sneakily peaking up at me smiling back. I continued firing.
“Nan, I get that you're hurting. Honestly, I do. But he's like the only person beside you that I've ever had the full connect with. You got Melvin, and before that you had Alessandro and Melissa and Kolvin, and you've got people. People that treat you right, that admire you and genuinely want to be with you. And above all, you have in me the insurmountable devotion of a blind pleb worshiping your every wink and twist.”
She giggled, still hiding, and a winged guardian gawked in response somewhere beyond the rooftops.
“And I have you like I've never had anybody, like I'll never have any creature living or imaginary. You're so nestled in that it hurts when I'm away from you, like being with you is realtime and the rest is on idle. I want to give you everything, I want to take from you everything that you'll offer up. Gobble it down, sharp end and all. I wanna grow inside your soul, mend and roll through eternity. When I'm with you I feel immortal. Untouchable. I wanna have your babies Nan. And nothing can touch that.”
Her body tensed, shivers of tram or plain cold I couldn't say. Rising on her elbows with an indecipherable look, she climbed on top of me, sat upright, crimson breasts bathing in the grainy moonlight.
“But Teddy, he's got none of it. Not a sliver of warmth crawling his way. And that’s like the whole point. Teddy is lost. He’s not some monster. But everyone looks at him like he is, and he’s been shunned his whole life and now he’s all stranded with no skills to pick himself up; no friends, no nothing. When I see him it’s like I can feel his lifeforce resting in my hands and if I turn my back on him, what cunt am I? Am I that cunt?”
I looked at my hands as if I would actually see the hypothetical cunt materialize in purplish goo.
“Keep talking,” she said feverishly, placed my hands on her hips, resting her own on my chest with its blood-caked chessboard, trickles of red oozing out of the cracks.
“Imagine never having this. I mean not even a frame of reference. Imagine never having felt the love I feel, never even seen its shadow slip you by.”
"You want to have my babies?" she smiled. Her eyes were all doped up, like a predator toying.
“Yes,” I replied. “I love you Nan. And I will always love you. But I need to save him.”
She put her hand over my mouth.
“We're done talking,” she moaned.
A seagull cackled from the roof, greeting the summer in its own demonic way, chanting for the lord of darkness to return from his exile as we embarked upon our river of red ruin.