In Fog -- 9
My love, did you know we lived but a day’s journey from the ocean? It giggled when I planted my face against the window, and it froze me. So close it came, the timbre but not the pitch, almost yours.
It was improving. Practicing, perhaps, when I slept? For what reason I could not know...it had me already, what need was there to pretend.
“We can stop at the next station if you like,” it whispered, it whispered so often on that ride, kept so close, always it was touching me. Holding me, around waist or chest or shoulders, I wore it as one might a well-worn coat.
Your hands, however cold and hard they were when first you woke—it woke—they were soft then. And warm, my love, not warm enough to mistake for living but...warm enough not to flinch, not to shrink from. Warm enough to enjoy. I thought it the feeding, the blood, yet I could recall no time previous when its skin did not chill—save its paradoxical lips.
“Is it by the sea?” I asked it, never looking from that stretch of blue. But a thin line on the horizon, it vanished into the sky. How I ached for it to be you with me, my love, to share that sight, that first with you. To have your hands so comfortably slipped under my shirt, certain to keep your skin on mine.
Your hands though they were...it was not you, and it would never be.
No matter how it tried, “Oh yes, darling, we can even find somewhere on the beach to stay.” Those lips teased my neck, blood dried but ever-present to my eyes, a stain that would never wash clean, “We could dance in the sand,” your hands, its, explored as it spoke, endless in its hunger, its want, “Have you felt the ocean’s touch, heard her sweet song?”
I had not, you would have known, so surely it did. But perhaps not, perhaps there were avenues closed to even it, “You know so much of me, but not that?”
It smiled, it bore no reflection to find that smile in and that should have startled me, my love, truly it should have. There were no mirrors in our lodge, no reflective surface to catch it in that I noticed. So I should have been startled.
Yet I was not, instead I expected it, took it as another facet of its oddity, its otherness. So the smile went unseen but felt, on my neck, as your lips spread too thin.
“I know enough,” it cooed, in the echoed way it twisted your voice, “am I to take your pressing as a ‘no’?”
It did not know everything. My mind, my heart, my very soul were laid bare for it whenever I dared think or dream in its presence...but it did not know everything. Hope, my love, there was hope in that, if in nothing else.
“No, this is my first view of it,” How unfair of it to have your hands, worse to know their use. Torture, my love, confused and agonizing and I crumbled in them. Every single time I crumbled.
“Then I will give you the sea, my darling, for all you have given me,” warm, too warm its breath, its lips, your lips, my love, yours, I tried to hold that they were yours.
It was weak and petty of me to lean on the lie but I had to, I had to, for if it were not you...at least in some way then whose touch did I sink into? Whose affections did I ache for? I struggled in that train car, in its grasp. It wanted me. Beyond all else I worried of, wondered of, that I knew without doubt. It wanted me and only me.
But who...do I want...Oh that thought, that horrid little slip. To go back, of all I could undo, of all the horror I witnessed, endured, committed, that damnable thought would go first.
“Me,” it purred and echoed that purr traveled too easily along my skin, too low to stay my lips, my hands.
On a backdrop of endless blue I devoured blood-stained skin that was no longer you. I claimed it as mine, and mine alone, certain in the echoes of its moaning breaths that it spoke true.
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