pilate
/
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
I don’t want to be here, I think, staring at him. I can’t handle it.
The omnipresent dark crawling closer from every angle. The faint flicker of his yellow candles against the bookshelves. The heat of his body melting me like I am some teenage groupie, shocked to stillness in the presence of their idol. I don’t want to be here, I think, dread rising in my throat along with a taste like bile, and when I blink, even that millisecond where my eyes are removed from the darkness of his—that less-than-a-heartbeat—makes me feel stunningly, cripplingly alone.
I don’t want to be here. But I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
The quick beat of my heart feels like drowning. My blood roars in my ears, loud-and-soft, loud-and-soft; and I can hear the way it crashes up against my chest, tides pulled by the moon, waves on the shore.
There have been many times that I feel like Ruth: heartless, cold and stony inside. (It cannot be coincidence that my mother made me in Medusa’s image, and sometimes I wonder if I was meant to be more powerful than I am. Sometimes I wonder if she meant this body for someone else. Sometimes I wonder if I was not meant to be sand. but stone—all the way through.) But this is not one of them. This is the opposite. Everything is happening at once, and heat burns behind my ears and against the curve of my throat, and darkness is bleeding into my vision from the edges in, and I am tumbling over and over and over myself into the pit of my own heart.
Boom—fast, like your throat being cut.
I know Andras is the only one of us who really crackles with electricity. But damn if I don’t feel electric, heat sputtering over every inch of my dark skin, twisting and turning between the layers of scales, making my snakes itch; and my lips curl as I try to keep it down, that urge to move or bite or say something, anything at all.
Instead, for perhaps the first time in my life, I am quiet. Silent, even. Even when Andras steps toward me, all I can hear is the raspy way my breath hitches in my throat when I make the effort to reel it in.
Are you trying? he dares me. To help it? And my mouth curls in an awkward movement; a movement that even I can’t tell is meant to be a smile or a grimace. I only know that it feels wrong. It makes the hinge in my jaw ache, a pain that radiates all the way into my skull. It makes my chest contract like it’s facing the weight of a boa constrictor. And even through those feelings, I somehow manage, dazedly, distractedly, to remain focused on the way his mouth moves when he smiles and says: I’m obsessed, I think.
And I laugh.
I break into a real smile, wide and bright and glittering; my eyes narrow with the force of it, and when that laugh bubbles to a close, I can’t help that it trails off into a smirk. Satisfaction floods me in one long dark wave of electricity, spikes me bright white and red and gold all over until I feel closer to godliness than I’ve ever felt before in my life, and oh—isn’t that saying something.
“Of course you are,” I answer, throaty, still smirking. And I know just from the way it sounds that my eyes must be dark, dark, dark, and that when I reach out and hover my mouth just an inch from his, my whole face must be flushed with rough, nearly wicked pleasure. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
