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At the end of the day, you find yourself on your knees, as you so often do.
Gauzy fabric, nearly as thin as the heavy air around you, settles around your face. You’ve never sat well completely blind; you panic in the dark, when danger lurks and you can taste it but you can’t see. Layers and layers of material wrap around you, like an upscale doxy’s skirts, each wicking away just a little more of your sight, until all you can make out is one single glowing ball of fire. The red-dyed candles in the candelabra on the desk burn as one, giving off the faint musty scent of alkanet root, and it’s all you can see through the layers of your blindfold until he steps in front of it, slow, like an eclipse of the sun.
“How’s that?” he asks you, and you nod. It’s good, it’s good, you nod, it’s itchy but soft, it’s good, it makes your outsides as hazy as your insides. The ends drape over your shoulders and run down your back like ocean spray, brushing against the small of your bare back. They frame your spine like curtains to the window of your ribcage, drawn back here and only here to bare the performance of your heart. He leans into you, your chest to his, your face pressed into his neck, and you breathe in slow as he squeezes your hands in his and he pulls back after.
The eclipse passes the opposite direction as he steps away again and the warm light of the candelabra filters back through your blindfold, lighting up the fabric for you. It too is a dark and beautiful red, like blood-stained crushed velvet. Red skies at night, you think, because you’ve lived through another day and here at the end of it is peace.
You fought today, violently and bloodily, over sheaves of paper and yellowed maps. He’d spotted a scout vessel for a merchant company, one he said would have information. He said it would have guns, too, and he was right on both counts, so you stormed the decks before they could sink you and you slaughtered your way to the office. You brought him log books and timetables and his eyes sparked with delight as he flipped through them and saw they were in code. He said to you as you stood before him covered in other men’s blood, once you swore to him that you were unscathed, “Perfect, Iz. Well done. Go clean yourself up and come back tonight. I should have cracked this by then.”
“Yes, sir,” you said, and here you are now, kneeling in front of his desk, with the log books lit up by the sun in his candelabra and a complete cypher scratched onto a piece of parchment and his attention completely and wholly on you.
(You had already had your own taste of enjoyment before you came here, put your hand to your mouth before you stripped off your glove. Alone in your cabin, you slid your tongue between your index and middle fingers and pulled away iron-drenched and savage with victory staining your teeth. You were hungry, you were starving, not for the taste or the color but for what it meant. Your own blood felt hot, then, burning and directionless, telling you one thing: you are alive you are alive you are alive, and one thing more: you have given and you have given and you have given, by the point of your sword, and now you are ready to receive.)
“Show me where you would have died for me,” he whispers in your ear, and you have never needed to see to obey that particular order. Your body is nothing much, littered with scars and hair, soft parts and hard, bruises that never seem to heal and skin the sun never touches. On your own, you don’t care much for it, but the scars you remember, the ones that matter. The ones you accepted and made part of you because the other option was unthinkable, the ones where you opened your skin and your veins so that he wouldn’t have to. The ones he always asks to see, because they belong to him and have since you earned them in his name.
Your fingers are steady as they run up your body, knees to hips to belly to chest. You point out a flat gash on the inside of your thigh: a bullet graze that nearly killed you, spilling more blood than you’d ever seen in your life. You point out a long, jagged twist of skin on your hip, standing out among the rapier punctures, not the first time you’d used the trick he taught you to swallow a sword meant for him but the time it really mattered. You point to a ragged split of skin in the webbing of your right palm, where you’d grabbed an incoming sword aimed at him by the blade and shredded yourself on it. You point to a long line just under your neck, dangerously close to your throat, where you spat at the feet of those who insulted his honor and got a blade to the neck for your troubles. You point to a little furl of a scar under your ribs, the mirror of a much larger one on your back next to your spine, where you had been subjected to the metaphor of a failed mutiny made tangible. You point to a single deep canyon in your left shoulder where a dagger had sunk in to the hilt; you’d screamed, that day, in agony, as the edge of the blade caught on your bones and carved an oath into them, that you’d do it again, and again, and again, until one name was etched onto your skeleton.
“That one almost got me,” he agrees as your hands drop back into your lap. You nod; you remember. A raid on a naval ship, on a day you were low on munitions and their thirty cannons promised barrels of powder if nothing else, and you had to be strategic, which meant your crew swarmed their decks like angry wasps so their guns couldn’t reach you. A good enough idea, except for when a knife cut through the air, directed straight at his heart, and you killed its owner with a cutlass through the bottom of his chin and out through his mouth before you even got a chance to take the dagger out.
These six scars are not the only ones you have. They are not the only ones that have nearly killed you. You’ve flirted with death since you crawled aboard your first pirate ship, decades ago now, nothing to you but your name and a shortsword tied to your hip and a ring looped on a thin scarf around your neck. You’ve been torn open more times than you can count, bled as many drops as there are stars in the sky, but in the end, you lived, and none of those times mattered in the end, except for these.
“Let me take them back,” he says, he begs, into your skin. You shudder; you nod. You bare your already naked skin, like you could flay yourself down to the bone and hand him the pelt. Into the dark, hazy air, you speak the words, “What’s mine is yours.”
“What’s mine is yours,” he echoes, and it makes the corners of your mouth curve up, just a little, how you belong to each other, how when you’re like this together he doesn’t whisper back what’s yours is mine.
He starts at the bottom, as he always does, getting down on the floor with you, getting on his hands and knees and folding himself in two. Behind the blindfold, you can’t really see him, even if you looked; everything is vague and fuzzy, except for the sun cradled in the candelabra on the desk. This is fine. You don’t need to see him. You’ve always known just where he is.
You spread your thighs for him, lean back and cant your hips up, shiver when his hair ghosts against your lower belly and his beard scratches at your knee. His breath burns your skin over the bullet graze, and then his lips part around the scar and his tongue tastes the memory and his teeth dig in. It’s a dull pressure, and a sharp ache, and a deep sting, and a looming threat; he sucks, and your blood pools faster under your skin. His jaw sets like he’s going to tear a hole in you, but you’ve bled enough for him. You’ve paid your dues, and now he’s paying you back with interest.
The moment he releases you, when the pressure stops and the jagged curves of his teeth go away, the tension snaps and you shudder violently. Your shoulder hunch; your thighs draw together, as much as they can with him between them; your insides throb, hot and hungry. Your breath comes fast through your teeth now, and so does his, you notice, still down there next to your scar, his head pillowed on your thigh.
“Gorgeous,” he pronounces it. Blunt nails scrape over your new bruise and you choke on a soft cry as the ache of it grips your throat. Your dick is hard - has been for a while, if you’re honest, since you stripped yourself down and knelt for him. It throbs in time with your heartbeat as his thumb traces around the edge of the bruise, around the indents of his teeth. The bite will fade soon enough, but the bruise will linger for long enough for you to press your thighs together tomorrow and feel the ache in the very core of you.
He offers you no quarter, no relief, as he pushes himself up on his elbows and buries his face in your hip instead of where you might prefer it. You have the same mess of scars there, the two of you – him more than you, because you make it a point to never get hit, except when you have to, for him. Sometimes you think he enjoys it, getting run through like that, like he’s got something to prove. Blackbeard can take a sword through the gut and live to tell the tale. They don’t know that you’ve wiped coughed-up blood from his lips after, or that you’ve hidden your own, the handful of times you’ve had to follow his lead.
His teeth bracket one particular wound, a violent and near-deadly one, when you’d been run through with a cutlass instead of a rapier and felt like you nearly got cut in half. It’s a long, angry line among those little spots of scar tissue, rough from coming out as much as going in. That had been it for you, that day, and several days after; you hadn’t had the wherewithal to count. You only knew that you woke up smelling like sweat and bile and herbs, feeling like you were pinned to your surgeon’s table like a butterfly, and he came and looked at you like one too.
(“Hands,” he said, and you said, rasped, choked out, “Blackbeard, sir,” and something flashed across his face. He said, “No, don’t try to talk,” but you said, “Edward,” anyway, and he said, “It’s okay, I know,” and you knew that he meant it.)
He braces your other hip in his hand, the bone in his palm, holding you still as you twitch beneath him. His tongue traces over each twist and whorl of the scar, which healed poorly at first and then melted into the rest of your flesh over the years. It isn’t as painful as the cutlass was, but it is as hot, and the ache around it burrows into you, settles over your left hip. Your blood comes up as it had done that day, battering at the inside of your skin, and his nails replace his teeth as he scratches right in the center of the bruise and you snap your head back and howl through pressed-together lips.
“Easy, easy,” he gentles you. His thumb strokes over your hip bone, moving with you as you rock gently on your knees. “None spilled.”
“Please,” you gasp.
“You want it to?”
“For you, it could.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and then his nails are replaced by something else– something soft– something warm but not hot– his nails are replaced by his lips and he kisses the scar and he murmurs into your skin, “I think you’ve bled enough for me, Izzy.”
You huff and shake your head, because you both know better, better than to assume you’ll never bleed again for this life, for this ship, for this man. He laughs at that and says, “Fair enough, mate, but not tonight.”
He leans up and kisses your mouth then, his lips parting yours, pressing your tongue against his like you can taste your own blood on it anyway. You sink into it instantly, and better, you feel him do the same. He reaches between your legs and digs his thumbnail into the bruise on your thigh and he swallows your gasp, your quiet whine, your iron-hot plea.
Then he drops back down again with his elbows braced on the floor and buries his face in your belly. You’re getting soft with age, but it gives him space to bite at you, bracket that rosebud of a scar with his teeth and suck like he’s trying to pull it out of you. It must taste bitter, like a serpent’s venom; the mutiny you held off certainly did. Just a handful of men, at the time, angry and drunk on loss, and they rushed him but for some reason they didn’t seem to expect you. You put your body between them and him and you met his eyes as the blade sunk into your back and your lips parted as the barest point of iron tore through the front of your shirt and spat blood onto his chest. In the corners of the fury in his face, in the factional widening of his eyes, you saw cracks form and then harden again, shining out like gold and pulling him back together. The pause was just enough time for him, to grab his gun and to grab his knife and to holler to the upper decks, and he was still holding off the mutineers when you shot one in the face before passing out.
When you came to, hours later instead of days with bandages wrapped around your middle under your unbuttoned shirt, you crawled up onto the deck to silence. The ship was moving, with your colors whipping uncharacteristically in the open sea, heading up seven bodies dangling from the yard of the foremast. Over the course of days, they came down in bits and pieces and you felt every retch and heave and flinch of the remaining crew in your back as your organs scarred over. He came up behind you, once you could walk, and touched you at the base of your spine, and you watched together as the threats rotted and ripped themselves apart and sank.
Once he finishes marking you, tearing that memory out of you, he sits back on his knees and gives a thoughtful little hum. He helps you up again and takes your hand in his, gently, a facsimile of a lord or a gentleman. He holds your palm in his fingers like it's precious. He lifts your hand and lowers his head and his lips find your tendons, the thin veins that run to your fingers, the nerves that curl your knuckles. The kiss he presses there is close mouthed at first, and then his lips part, and part, and part, the flame of his tongue burning hotter and hotter against your skin. You play at softness together until his teeth close around you, around the torn webbing between your forefinger and thumb, and his tongue works against you. It's extra private, like this, taunting at exhibitionism before drawing back behind leather curtains. Beneath your glove, no one will see this, not the mutineers and not the very most loyal. No one will know, and why should they? Your love does not belong to them. Your blood does not run for them. Your scars were not knit together with their breath on your skin.
This scar never belonged to a fatal wound, but it scared you the most. The first time you tried to pick up your sword, your hand wouldn’t grasp it and it clattered to the ground. The tissue was too sensitive, the muscles more atrophied than you’d expected for the short time you’d rested it, and you feared through your sinking stomach that you’d never hold a blade again. You’d never pull a rope. There would never be a point to you again, with the one thing you’d always had now shredded. You glanced at him – younger then, fiery and not quite as fond of you as he is now – and wondered if he’d keep you, like this, and you couldn’t bear to find out. So you pulled a thick leather glove onto your hand and you learned to hurt when you fought, until it didn’t hurt anymore, which meant you were free and you were unstoppable.
You feel the curve of a smile against your hand, and then his tongue as he pulls two of your fingers until his mouth. He sucks on these too, and you bite back a moan. His tongue works between your knuckles, forcing them apart, getting at your calluses and the skin between your fingers, and you feel the pressure of him swallowing before he pops them back out again and lays your hand back on your own thigh. You flex your fingers in your lap to feel the dull ache of the bruise and the wet heat on your skin.
He crowds into you; his knees push yours apart and he makes a space from himself inside you. He strokes his thumb along the scar in your shoulder and presses in until he feels the nick in the bone. You squirm a little, so he holds you still as he notches his thumbnail in it like an arrow on a bowstring, and then scrapes the dent in your skin away. You must flinch more than you think, because his touch goes soft and he says, “Hey,” and traces the line again, gently. “Does it hurt?”
“Yeah,” you murmur, which is a half truth. It does hurt, but it also feels strange, to be marked like that, for him, in a place where you can’t even see it.
“Do you want me to take this one back?” he asks, but before he can even finish the sentence, you’re nodding, near frantic. Of course you want him to take it back. You want to see it, you want to look at yourself in a shard of glass tomorrow and recognize every part of your body. “Okay, okay, easy.”
“Bite me,” you reply, taunt and plea all at once, so he does, with exactly as much mercy as you wanted, which is to say none at all. You shout wordlessly to the sky when his teeth sink into your flesh and threaten to break through. One canine hits the bone so you can pretend with your whole throbbing heart that it’s him who tore into your bones. He rips your blood out, just under the surface, so that when you next touch yourself there, you’ll only feel one thing and it’s not the edge of a knife.
At the last, he releases you and pulls you against him, one arm around your waist and the other hand curled around the back of your neck. He holds you like a lover as he buries his face in the bend where your shoulder meets your neck. You tilt your head for him and the gauzy ends of the blindfold swish against your back again. You’d shiver, but he’s so warm against you, so big and consuming that there’s nothing else but that.
He brushes his lips over your sixth scar, the one that runs from the hollow of your throat and out along your collarbone like an underline of your swallow tattoo. An inch to the left, an inch to the north, and the rest of your life would have been very short-lived indeed. You saved yourself, and then he saved you after, cramming a rag into the wound as he threw an arm around your back, pulled your own over his shoulder, and the two of you stumbled away as your crew took care of the rest. He took you away and did your stitches himself and he waited until he’d tucked the end of the bandages down before he pressed his mouth to it for the very first time.
Lips give way to teeth, again, again, warmth gives away to heat, and one ache trades for another. He bites into you like he’s going to rip your body apart, like something ravenous. He pulls you with his teeth and you go, you cry out into his shoulder and wrench your head back to pray wordlessly to the ceiling. The sun shines in its cradle, just out of view, just over his shoulder, waiting for you as the only thing that has ever compared to it rends you apart.
Only once you’re aching with it, when you’re trembling and hurting like desperation and your skin is inches away from tearing and staying with him in ways that even you never could, he lets you go. Your whole body shudders and trembles and you try to curl in on yourself again, but he’s there, solid for you to run yourself into, so you curl in around him instead. You think he hushes you; you think he strokes your hair, blows cool air around the bruise that will sit directly under your sword strap. You think he says things, whispers them into your skin, but you’re a little past words right now and your hands are still in your lap as if they were tied so you can’t reach out and catch them. You can only trust that, if they’re important, you’ll hear them again. You can only hope that they’re spoken into your skin once more before your blood spills forward anew.
For that moment, you close your eyes, even to the dimness of the blindfold. You lean forward and you bury your face in his shoulder. He smells good, like leather you cared for, like the polish you bought in Martinique, and like you, underneath it. You breathe in deeply, and he pushes your sweaty hair off of your temple and smooths it back. Your skin tugs as you move and the bruises stretch deliciously achy over your bones. You float in the feeling of knowing that you’re held together and whole.
He presses into you, his thighs slotted between yours, his chest to your belly and his lips back to your ear. “Would you like to bleed for me?”
“Yes,” yes, yes, yes, you do. You always do, you always have.
“Would you like to burn for me?” he breathes into your skin, as if that’s not exactly what you’re doing.
“Yes,” you hiss back. You arch your chest out, reach back to brace your hands on the floor behind you, make yourself a target. His body bends with yours, him forward and you back, his nose tucked against the corner of your jaw as your chest heaves.
“Good,” he whispers into your skin, and he holds you a moment longer before pulling away and getting back onto his knees.
Again, the two of you begin at the beginning. The sun sets in your vision, past the horizon of your eyes, and then a sudden, searing pain starts dripping down the inside of your thigh. You gasp and clench your jaw, dig your nails into the floor, as liquid fire oozes across your bruised skin. You can feel the heat from the candle’s flame, as much as you can feel anything but the burn. It comes methodically, relentlessly, drop by drop, all the way from one end of the scar to the other, inflaming the bruise he’d left even more. It sweeps back and forth like a pendulum, eking into all the spaces it didn’t reach the first time, it didn’t reach the second time, it didn’t reach the third time, until it makes a mask, a scrap of hardening armor, so that you can’t be touched there anymore.
As it cools, he nudges your shoulders back a little and you adjust yourself for him to be a more pliable canvas. You drop your head back, hanging between your knotted shoulders, and the heat begins again on your hip. You hiss through gritted teeth as the wax flows over the scar, over the bruise, down into the canyon where your hip meets your thigh. It twists into your hair and seeps into the cracks of your skin where you’ll have to pry it out with a knife, if you wanted to shed it at all. Drops of wax fall like heavy rain on your constellation of rapier scars around the bruise, little knots of tissue dedicated to his cleverness, and then the downpour comes again, cutting you open and sealing you up again all at once. It pours down to the wound on your thigh, uniting the two, stitching you tighter and tighter back together.
He carefully pulls you upright again and takes your hand, holds it palm up while you cup your fingers like you’re receiving water. The sun’s heat ghosts slowly past your knuckles, just on the verge of burning your skin before it moves away, onto the next fingertip, and the next. You blink through the blindfold, and it looks through the haze like you hold the whole sky in one hand. Fire hits your palm all at once, a warmed up backlog of it, and you have to fight not to jerk away. It sears at you, makes your fingers twitch. It puddles up and its own heat keeps it fresh, keeps the cooled bubbles breaking as more and more floods out of the sun. Some slips between your palm and your thumb, between your clenched fingers, and trickles to the floor like sand. Tiny sparks of heat pepper your thighs, burning for a split second like flash paper and gone as he runs your own blood through your hands.
The sun dips, orbits back to its home, and rises again, high enough that you feel its warmth on your face like the real thing. It heats your lips, and your tongue when you part them. It glows through all the layers of fabric, a hot beacon, until one knuckle tips your head up and out of the way. The light bobs, tilts, and then wax begins to streak down your sternum, tangling in the hair there on its way down your body. It flows down in thick little rivulets, matting itself in waves, until it reaches the bruise and sears you with a soft little gasp on the other side of your skin. You know what you look like right now, red-splattered and panting, something deep scarlet and hot spilling down your front. Your lifeblood layers and layers; it runs down to your belly inside and out, and you pant against it until you can’t anymore, until you are hemmed in by it, held still and held together.
One hand winds through your hair, nearly gentle, and then jerks your head to the side. You bear it, twist with it, resist it to be pulled harder, and as ever, he obliges. He holds you in place as a line of fire begins to pour down your collarbone like a waterfall in a hidden cove. The wound is deep and the heat aches, leaching into your bones like the teeth of the knife had, branding you something different this time. It spatters across your skin and in your chest hair again; it overflows like a glass of wine; it runs over your nipple, which makes you yelp behind your teeth. He doesn’t laugh at you. He wouldn’t, about this. He just sucks in a soft breath through his nose, and for a second, he replaces the sun as he brushes his lips over the sensitive skin, the stray spark of pain that has no place here. He’ll torture you there for hours if you want it, but not when it’s like this. Not when the two of you are reclaiming yourself together.
He taps one finger against the pool of wax until it’s hard and unmalleable, and then he moves your head to the other side again, gently this time with your skull cradled in his palm. The sun sets again as he leans in and he licks one long, slow stripe over that scar, from your shoulder to your throat, and all the way up to your chin, where he presses his face against your jaw. You feel his breath on your skin after and you grin blindly up at the ceiling. This above all else is euphoria. You’re giddy with it, nearly laughing, though your breath catches between your teeth when the light of a shooting star rises and reclaims your sixth pain for itself.
The wax gathers in the hollow of your collarbones like it had in your palm, but the skin is so thin here, thin enough to break under the right edge of a tooth. The sun twists and dances, turning this way and that, burning every angle of the candle down onto you and working ash into your blood. The heat carries in the veins in your neck and up into your head, making you flushed and dizzy with it. You want to turn your face; you want to put it in your mouth; you want to swallow the sun whole and warm yourself inside out, until the light shines out through the six cracks that make up who you are.
When it finally dries, he sets the candle aside and reaches up with both hands and presses his palms to each spot, grinding them into your skin like he’s trying to push your blood back into you. His thumbs dig into your chest; his fingertips press into your wounds. He touches each one with heavy reverence, your neck down to your thighs. Over your own heavy breath, you hear soft cracks and snaps as he breaks the seals of your body again, revealing you fresh and new and whole.
After the last one breaks, his knuckles ghost against your cock, still hard and wet and hungry. He twists his wrist to cup you in his hand and he grinds up with the heel of his palm and groans softly as you spasm against him and paint him slick. He says, “Fuck, Izzy, let me,” and you say, “yes,” immediately, “yes,” so he pushes you down, onto your back, onto the ground with him over you. He kisses you seven times, once on your mouth and once over every broken layer of wax that he’s protected you with. He kisses your thigh last and breathes the scent of you in deep, and then tilts his head and presses his mouth to you. He laves his tongue over the tip of your cock, making you spasm beneath him, and then sucks the whole thing into his mouth all at once like he’s trying to swallow you whole. You arch and cry out to the ceiling to the tune of more wax cracking and snapping across your body as your armor starts to break down again. Both your hands come to tangle in his hair. You pull, heedless of the wax that tangles in the strands, and he groans so that you can feel it, laps around the base of your cock as best he can with his mouth forced so wide.
He pulls back just enough to growl into your skin, “Fuck me,” so you do. You wrench his head down and make him swallow all of you. You buck and thrust against his face and he sucks at you hard. It’s wet, sloppy, no finesse at all – he can suck cock proper, you’ve seen him do it, all slow licks and eye contact, but he has you now like he’s devouring you, even though you’re the one dragging him down. You brace your feet on the floor and fuck his mouth as the wax crumbles with the thrashing of your body.
The buildup of the night, and the day before it, has you already stretched thin and on edge. You become unsteady, uncoordinated; you become your need, nothing more than the low ah ah ah being driven out of your chest. You ride his tongue like forty knot winds, violent and frantic and lost to the forces of nature. “Edward,” you gasp, “fuck,” and his hands wind around your hips and hold you tight to him until the tension snaps and you snap with it, arching your back and flooding his mouth in three strong pulses. Just barely over the thundering of your heartbeat in your ears and the keening from your lips, you hear him swallow and you hear him moan and you hear him hush you as he guides you back down to earth.
You feel, vaguely, him crawling up your body, and suddenly his lips are on yours, and the taste of you is pushed between them. You open up wide as his tongue presses past your mouth and your teeth click together. He feeds you to yourself, spits in your mouth, and you swallow it greedily. What’s yours is his, after all, and what’s his is yours.
You become aware, gradually, of the jostling movement between your legs. He must have pulled himself out at some point, because he’s stroking himself now, frantic, looming over you and panting through his teeth. A rare thready whine tears out of his chest and falls on you, and you swallow that too without hesitation.
“Where?” he asks, and his voice is thin and tight, held back by the skin of his teeth. “Iz, where–?”
He’s had you everywhere, had you on all of your scars, scraped away your blood and scabs and scars and colored them white instead of red. He’s reclaimed you in every way the two of you could think of, blood and ink and spit and come and scratchy pads of callused fingers and creaking leather-clad palms. It does not matter where he has you this time. It only matters that he does. He told you one time, the past does not own you. I do, and it is never more clear than now.
You reach down and sink your nails into the hardened wax on your belly. You claw it apart, ripping it out from your hair and your skin. His free fingers twine with yours, scraping you clean, unsteady and uncoordinated as his body tremble violently. He shudders against you and grabs your hand and jerks it away, and a second later he sucks in a breath and sighs out your name and a new type of heat brands your stomach for the third time tonight. You fumble blindly until you find his thigh and you brush your thumb across his bare hip as he leans in and rubs the head of his cock through the mess. It smears slippery up to your ribs, and he fucks his come into your skin with his own softening body until it starts to stick the two of you together.
He lets out a soft breath and a softer laugh, which makes you grin blindly up at the ceiling as he pulls back and sits up. You feel sticky and achy and tight from the remnants of the wax, burnt and bruised and had and held. You hear his footsteps moving, the clicking and clinking of things on his desk. The sun rises one last time and stays in the blood red sky of your slitted vision.
You hear the flick of a knife and your body twitches and tenses, just for a moment. He laughs again and the sound makes you settle like a slug of rum. “Do you want me to take it all off?”
“Probably should,” you rasp. It’s a shame, but it’s so much easier when he does it, so much better. You hear the sounds of him settling back on the ground between your legs, casting warmth onto your bare knees, and the cold flat of a blade settles against your thigh, at the edge of the first scar, and then stops.
“Do you want to look first?” he asks.
You consider, running one hand up the hardened peaks of wax in your chest hair, and you nod. A gentle hand lifts up your head, then slowly starts to unwind the scarf. The light comes back in gradually, a slow rise to the surface. You close your eyes anyway until the last layer pulls away, and then you squint blearily up at the sun, now just a cluster of candles on his desk. The same ones he reads by at night, the same ones you idly pass your fingers over, the same ones he burns needles with to stitch you up. A couple red-dyed drops ooze down the pillars and pool in the curves of the candelabra. The two of you are similar in that way, full of blood and burning light.
When you open your eyes fully and push yourself up onto your elbows, your body is drenched in red again. It feels like your natural state, sometimes, to be torn open and crimson. But here you are instead, patched together, all your wounds covered up and replaced with something beautiful. Your fingertips ghost over the streams and drops that cascaded down your shoulders and oozed down your belly and dripped off your thigh. You look like a corpse but you never feel more whole and alive than this. You look like you’re dying again but when you squint, you can see your flesh underneath, pink and purple and shiny and whole and new.
When you look up at him again, he’s watching you, and his eyes are quiet. There’s no raging fire behind them, no shattering storm, no claw marks on the inside of his skull. He’s not bleeding all over the floor, made calm by the fact that you aren’t either. Your hand curves around the bend of his knee and squeezes, and he sucks in another soft breath and the corners of his eyes crinkle up. He glances down at the knife, and back at you, flips the blade around in his hand to tap the underside of your chin with the hilt, and says, “Off now?”
You raise your chin, just a fraction. You meet his eyes and you smile. “Maybe we can leave it for a little bit longer.”