Fragment #1
His fingers traced a lazy arc across the glistening skin of her stomach. Her breath caught as they spiraled closer and closer to her naval. She grabbed his hand and moved it to the soft shadowed space between the top of her thigh and her pubis.
She rolled over and pulled out her knives,
"Cut me."
"Fuck me."
"Cut me."
"Fuck me."
He held his breath and put his head in his hands.
He woke with her bony arms wrapped around his neck, her head on his chest.
He considered her, and thought, "We're such a wreck, you and me."
When they'd first met she was all corsets, long legs, black lipstick, and midnight blue hair. when she hit a room heads turned, drinks spilled, and hearts stopped.
Now she was all red eyes, blue lips, and broken nails. She felt cold and brittle in his arms.
He thought about the other one, that reptilian little fuck... with his mouth full of hooks, piercing, pinching, holding and folding her skin. She says she can't remember but he knows.
He has written the other's death a thousand times over. In his journals he has decapitated, eviscerated, and dissected him. He has shot, stabbed, and strangled him. he has slit his throat from ear to ear, gouged out his eyes, and burnt him alive. He has dissolved the body in acid, buried it in lime, and ground the bones to dust. He has dismembered the body and thrown the pieces into the sea, the flesh to be carried far and wide in the bellies of fishes, the bones home to crustaceans. It's never enough.
A friend, a cop, once offered to take care of the other. "No one is going to miss that evil little fag, he runs his mouth too much. And you know we don't count the bullets here."
But that wouldn't work. They both knew it.
Later than night, half asleep, her head nestled into his shoulder, she said, "There are knives everywhere. Don't ever close your eyes and don't ever let me go."
He looked at her, her dark hair gleaming in the moonlight and thought about a dream: A dream in which she stood on the shore of a lake, surrounded by hemlock and willow trees. The water was still and her reflection was rendered precisely in reds, blues, silvers, greens, and greys.
A dream of the smell of pine trees and the look of wolf eyes.
A dream where they lined up behind her and she left them all black eyes, bloody lips, and broken teeth.
A dream where the two of them were drunk, stumbling through writhing streets, taking the time to admire the eerie geometry of slanted houses and shattered faces, before falling into secret places.
A dream where there were no scars to give them away.