Work Text:
It isn’t healing. That little bullethole in my cheek, puckered where the stitches ripped and a corpse shade of black. I’m starting to think it’s refusing to, the way a child refuses to walk and drums their fat little heels on the linoleum floor of a shopping mall. I am the wearied mother who has no valium to reach for.
At first, the flesh there looked like a steak gone bad. Purple and red giving way to a mottled green and yellow around the edges. The stitches began to heal and the skin started knitting itself back together. Red blood cells, collagen, new tissue, all of Joe’s little soldiers. Then my teeth tore right through their hard work.
When I walk down the street, people’s gaze slips right from my eyes to the place where flesh should be. I see the worry in their faces.
I shouldn’t be able to see the bone there.
I curl my lips back to expose more of the chipped and broken ivory graveyard in my mouth. It’s meant to be a smile. At least I think it is, but the muscles refuse to move the way they used to.
You’re telling me, I say.
I used to be such a nice guy.
There’s no issue in fight club. All the guys there look fucked up in one way or another. Noses folded over, the cartilage pummeled out of shape between fists and the concrete floor. Jaws wired shut so you have to drink your hospital food through a straw. Eye whites filled with red like a spreading blood spot in a hardboiled egg that your spoon can never quite catch. At least those guys get to wear sunglasses.
It doesn’t bother me. I’m used to pressing my fingers over the hole when I drink coffee and chewing on the other side. I tongue it when I’m distracted and I wonder if that’s what rot tastes like.
Tyler, on the other hand, is fascinated by it. That unsettling absence that reminds everyone we’re just meat and bone. The realisation that our bodies can and will screw us over.
I am Joe’s enlarged prostate.
When we sit across from each other in the kitchen with the sickly morning sun watching both of us nurse cups of coffee, his eyes fix on the point where my cheek isn’t. It’s a constant now, like the waxy bruises around my eyes and the cracked scabs of cigarette burns stamped up the pale underbelly of his arm. He never says anything so I don’t either.
Tyler, me, and the hole in my cheek makes three.
Sometimes he cups his own cheek and his fingers trace over where the hole would be torn into his own face. There’s something about the touch that feels reverent. Maybe that’s just because it’s Tyler touching himself. He doesn’t touch anyone else like that. Not me, not Marla, not angel face. We’re equally unimportant.
One evening, we’re sitting on the porch and there are empty beer bottles clustered around our feet. Neither of us were trying to keep count. The beer does nothing to soften Tyler’s gaze, directed at the side of my face.
“Does that bother you?” Tyler asks one evening.
I don’t have to ask what he means.
I’m trying not to think about how the neck of one could fit snugly through the hole. I think about the flickering streetlight across the street instead. It makes a valiant attempt amongst the dead stalks of the other lights.
I shrug.
Tyler hums.
He throws his empty bottle into the street, a lazy underarm. It shatters and scatters glass everywhere, joining the piles I’ve already nudged towards the curb. He gets to his feet and goes inside without another word. The way the air settles in the empty space beside me feels like the missing part of my cheek. I take another swig of beer and refuse to think about that too.
Another beer turns into two turns into four turns into stumbling through the front door in the pitch black. With most of the windows covered in soggy cardboard and that single flickering streetlight outside, navigating the labyrinth on Paper Street becomes a real task at night. It’s a hell of a lot harder if you’re piss drunk.
I grope at curls of sad floral wallpaper instead of the bannisters on my way up the stairs. Things are creaking and splintering under my feet. It’s difficult to care when you know it was bound to happen sometime. Better my foot than Marla’s in her wobbly second-hand high heels. Getting my nice work shoes ripped to shit would only make my boss’ nostrils flare a little more the next time he sees me.
Getting upstairs is slow going but I haul myself up regardless. Upstairs is my bed. Upstairs is the toilet to empty my stomach into. Upstairs is Tyler.
Tyler.
His bedroom door is open since he isn’t busy fucking Marla. There’s his shape stretched out on his bed. In the dark, I can’t tell if he’s awake or asleep. I don’t want to. If I could see his eyes open, fixed on the ceiling, or worse yet, me lingering in the doorway, I’d finish the miserable journey to my own room.
The sound of his breathing is always the same. We breathe in tandem. I’m always a step behind.
“What are you doing?”
Tyler’s voice makes the breath die in my lungs. My fingers curl around the doorframe. If I dig my fingers in, the way you dig your fingers into the joint of a guy’s jaw in a fight, the wood will splinter and come away in chunks. I think I’d do the same if Tyler did that to me.
“I asked you,” Tyler says. “What are you doing?”
I don’t know when I blinked, but Tyler and I are nose to nose in an instant. I’m drunk, it’s dark, I don’t ask questions.
I say, nothing.
I’m going to my room. I’m going to bed.
Tyler wraps his hand around my wrist. I’ve seen this hand crack a man’s jaw and patched up his broken knuckles afterwards. This touch feels tender by comparison.
“If you were going, you’d be in bed by now.” Tyler says.
If you lived here, you’d be home by now.
I want to live here. In this moment, I can’t think through the buzz and Tyler’s touching me. I can live in this.
Can I come in, I say.
Tyler looks at me. His eyes on me always burn. Lye on spit on skin.
His hand goes slack and falls away. He steps aside to let me in. It takes all of me to sit on the edge of his bed instead of collapsing onto it the way I want to. The sheets are rumpled but they’re cold. He’s been awake this whole time.
“You’re drunk.”
“I had a few beers.”
“How many?”
I don’t have an answer for him.
“You’re pathetic.”
I stay silent. I’m swaying where I sit, I have no real retort. An argument isn’t what Tyler’s looking for. We would be brawling in those shards of glass in the street if that was what he wanted. Instead, we’re here.
A hand cups my cheek. There is no reverence in this touch, but there’s skin against my premolars for the first time in weeks and I’ll accept it. I’ll accept anything Tyler gives me. We both know this. All I’ve done is prove it, week in, week out.
Yes, Tyler, you can hit me.
Yes, Tyler, you can burn me.
Yes, Tyler, you can cast me aside for Marla.
Yes, Tyler, anything you want.
“Does it hurt?” Tyler’s words come out in a breath.
His fingers stray to the border of puckered skin at the hole in my cheek. He’s something close to gentle as he touches it. Time has dulled it and the booze helps me ignore the rest. I shake my head.
“This?”
He brushes the scar tissue on the inside. My cheek used to be where his finger is. I think about the guy I used to be and I know the feeling would make bile rise in his throat.
No, I say.
He hooks the finger right through, pushing it between my teeth and the meat of my cheek, right against my gums. He’s tugging slightly. Part of me expects to see the point of a needle come through the skin, like Tyler would ever stitch me up instead of rip me apart.
It doesn’t hurt, I say.
It will hurt eventually. Soon. It’s already uncomfortable. Saying it won’t prevent Tyler any and I know this. He’s decided what he wants and I’m going to give it to him on a silver platter every single time. He’s going to make it hurt just because he can, because he’s never stopped testing me.
“Open your mouth.” Tyler says.
I do as he says and my cheek pulls taut. It makes the hole look worse, a ragged chasm looking into the dark cave of my mouth. Tyler presses another finger in beside his index, and this is when the pain begins.
When it happened it was quick. A simple bite down, like the moment before electroshock therapy. Anyone can bite down. It doesn’t take much effort to bite through a human finger. After the fact, I had so much adrenaline running through me that all I could feel was television static in my veins.
This is slow, methodical. He’s going to split me apart. I do not pull away.
Dimly, I think about asking Tyler to use some lube.
Tyler presses his fingers in, past the first, the second knuckle until his tobacco stained fingertips can rest on my tongue.
“How does it feel?”
I try to speak around the fingers in my mouth. Nothing intelligible comes out, but that’s satisfactory enough judging by the look on Tyler’s face. The project mayhem homework assignment, to pick a fight and lose, this must have been the look on the other guy’s face. That moment where something was punched loose and he realised what he was capable of.
Compared to everything Tyler has done to me, this doesn’t register as real pain yet. The dull ache of skin stretching a way it isn’t supposed to, the teeth on aluminum foil feeling of nerves being touched for the first time.
The fingers hooked through the hole in my cheek tug. It’s sharp, my eyes fall shut. I think of Alaskan trout and hundred dollar tuna and wonder if the ones killed in oil spills know how lucky they are.
“Look at me.”
Tyler’s words are sharper than the pain, they cut straight through it. I open my eyes and settle them on him. He’s vibrating with energy the way he does before a fight. His skin fights to keep him inside and his eyes are like gasoline puddles in the dim light. He licks his lips and I track the movement of his tongue.
His eyes on me feel like burning. Lye on spit on skin.
There's another fingertip nudging at my cheek. Tyler’s eyes don’t leave mine.
Tyler forces his third finger into the hole that tears itself apart to accommodate him. It hurts and I run headfirst into it. This is my pain, this is my cheek being ripped open by a man I can’t bring myself to say no to.
Why would I say no to the deliverance I begged for?
Please, Tyler, hurt me.
Please, Tyler, ruin me.
Please, Tyler, shove me off the edge to rock bottom.
I can taste blood, pooling around the fingers pressing my tongue down. You can swallow a pint of blood before you’re sick. I can barely swallow with my mouth wide open.
Tyler keeps going, keeps pushing, keeps watching.
The pain is brilliant. Radiant. It always is when it’s at Tyler’s hands, when Tyler watches me take it. I do it to prove I can. To prove that Marla, angel face, they’ll never take it the way I can. Because I need Tyler and the pain comes free. A two for one deal.
“Fucking look at you.” Tyler breathes.
Three of Tyler’s fingers rest on my tongue now. It spasms under his touch as I try to swallow. All I can taste is blood, drowning out the taste of Tyler’s skin. Every nerve ending is alight, howling in the base chambers of my brain. I think of the morning when Tyler leaned across the table to press his thumb into my blooming black eye, just to see what I’d do. It’s always a test and I flounder in my attempts not to fail.
Not this time. I’m not going to fail. I’ll cross the threshold of enlightenment with Tyler’s fingers shallowly fucking the chasm in my cheek.
“Close your mouth.” Tyler says.
I close my mouth. I swallow blood.
“Suck.” Tyler says.
I suck. A fresh wave of pain rattles the teeth sitting loose in my jaw.
His eyes are dark. The smouldering remains of a house fire, the cherry at the end of a cigarette.
There’s no decorum in the way Tyler drags his fingers out of my cheek, and the torn flesh catches on his skin. They’re covered in blood, my blood. It drips off the end of my chin. Like my shirt wasn’t stained with enough already.
Tyler’s bloody fingers take hold of my jaw, tilting my head. He eyes the hole, my teeth and tongue laying vulnerable inside. He gets to his feet.
I know where this is going before the buckle on his belt clicks open. This is where any normal person would pull away. Any normal person would’ve pulled away at the first finger. Tyler isn’t holding me very tight, I could still pull away.
I don’t pull away.
I never do.
I want Tyler to crash into me and I’ll deal with the wreckage. This isn’t love. He won’t piece me back together. I don’t think I’ll get more stitches after this.
Tyler’s skin is hot as it presses at the tear in my cheek. I open my mouth. I accommodate. Inch by burning inch, he presses his cock into my mouth.
I think about Marla. I think about both of us taking what Tyler gives us. I think about how she will never have this and revel in the sick glory settled in my chest.
I am Joe’s yearning heart.
Tyler curses somewhere above me, above the fog of pain, and takes a fistful of my hair. I always feel this small with him. He looms over me, the apathetic god made flesh, taking every sacrifice I offer. My body is on the altar and he takes it as he chooses. A kick in my ribs or his cock in my mouth, it’s all the same, really.
His pace is frantic and harsh, shallow thrusts I sit there and take and bleed. The machine gun fire snap of his hips, it’s all I can do to keep my teeth out of the way. Tyler has pushed me off the cliff and he’s fucking me into rock bottom.
Blood pools in my mouth and I can’t swallow around Tyler. The weight of him in my mouth is something I want to commit to memory. This is proof I passed the test. I let him do this. This isn’t pain I feel, it’s enlightenment.
Or it’s Tyler’s orgasm. They’re one in the same.
His thrusts stutter then stop. He pulls out with just as little grace as before and the hand in my hair eases up, lets go.
I swallow. All I can taste is my own blood.
Tyler takes my jaw in hand again, turning my face to look at me. My cheek gapes open, fever hot and slick with blood. My head spins. There’s something on his face like pride and the pain is nothing compared to the return of the awful glory.
“Cool.” Tyler says.
I never do go back to the doctors. I never get the hole stitched closed. I press my fingers over the hole when I drink coffee and chew on the other side. I see Tyler looking and it burns. Lye on spit on skin.