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1.
“I worry,” Lawrence says,
(sitting on the edge of the bathtub with his back to you and his head down, a shaking monolith of frayed nerves and weary love. You like to imagine there is love in there somewhere, even if it is fragile and warped, but you know that if it’s there it’s weary, worn down by time and all those who came before you.
He wants you to prove that you’re different.
You don’t know if you’ll live that long.)
and you think he’d be wringing his hands if his fingers weren’t wrapped around the knife, knee bouncing nervously. “I mean, this can’t last forever, can it? I know it can’t. Not really. Something’s going to go wrong, it always does.”
You think carefully before you speak.
(You have to; you have raw, oozing wounds all over your body to remind you, blood pooling in the bottom of the tub and crawling slowly towards the drain. You wish you could follow it.)
“Why can’t it last forever?” you ask.
You hear a sharp, bitter laugh and see his shoulders rise and fall with a heavy sigh. “They all say it will,” he tells you. “They all make promises. ‘Always and forever.’ Impossible things. Nothing lasts forever.”
He glances back at you over his shoulder, eyes narrow, gaze cold. You shiver and try to shrink back but there’s nowhere to go.
“Flowers wilt. Plants die. People are just as transient, but they’re not even half as pretty.”
He turns to face you, setting his feet down in the tub. You see him toy with the knife in his hands, running his finger along the blade. “I’m always sad if one of my flowers dies,” he says. He nicks the pad of his thumb against the tip of the blade and presses his finger to his lips, licking the blood away. “But I just feel empty when it’s a person. Like they were never there.”
You wrap your scarred arms around yourself, tears rolling down your cheeks. When he slides off of the edge and crawls in beside you, cornering you against one side of the tub, you whimper and back away as far as you can, the faucet digging into your back.
“Wait,” you say quickly, “Lawrence, listen to me, please, you don’t have to do this. I won’t make unrealistic promises, but…but I….”
“I know,” he says, his free hand rising to your face to stroke your cheek. You flinch at his touch and see the corner of his lips twitch, something dark inside of him clawing its way to the surface at your hesitation. “I know you won’t. I like that about you. You’re better than the others.”
He presses the tip of the knife into your soft neck and you go rigid, breath catching in your throat. “You,” he says, dragging the blade down with just enough pressure to scratch your skin, “aren’t like them. I look in your eyes and I see forever.”
You bite your lip to keep down a whimper. “Really?” you ask.
“Yeah.” He smiles tranquilly, and when the knife reaches your sternum, he thrusts it into your flesh. He holds your gaze as your eyes widen and seizes you by the throat when you inhale to scream, trapping the sound inside of you.
You feel his lips brush against your ear when he whispers, “Hush. Let’s enjoy this moment, just the two of us. No one else needs to know.” You feel him running you through with the knife, slowly slitting you open and gutting you. Your vision dims as your lungs burn for air and you feel blood running in rivulets down your skin.
Lawrence’s hands find their way into the wound and he sighs in euphoria. “I love you for what’s inside,” he whispers.
Everything flickers and twists. You reach for him, try to get him away from you, off of you, but you’re too weak. He’s already inside. You feel him under your skin trying to make a space big enough for him to get into, trying to open your ribcage and unravel your intestines and make himself comfortable, trying to make you his shelter.
You feel his every movement, his every breath and his every heartbeat, a parasite living off of the last of your warmth as it fades from your body.
He relaxes in your viscera and says, “This won’t be forever, either. But it’ll be beautiful while it lasts.”
2.
Vincent is in love with you.
You know, because he gets deeper than anyone else.
The silver light of a large, nearly-full moon shines on the other side of the curtains. You close your eyes and listen to his labored breathing turn to growls.
He tangles one hand in your hair and grasps you by the back of the head, crushing your lips with his. He bites you, nips gently at first and then pulls at your lower lip, sinking his teeth in harder and harder until you’re sure he’s going to draw blood. You taste it thick and coppery on his tongue when he forces his way into your mouth. You find yourself, flesh and blood, in the kiss and it makes you bolder, makes you try to wrap your arms around him, but he pins your hands above your head.
(You want to keep him, but you’re the one who’s being kept.)
His mouth trails down, over your chin, your throat,
(and pauses there a moment, hovers teasingly over your jugular, and you’re almost dizzy, almost euphoric with fear)
your collarbones, your chest, and he stops now and then to bite you hard enough that you whimper and writhe in pain, feeling a faint heat lingering wherever his teeth cut into you, the promise of soft marks, a road map down your skin of claimed territory.
He comes close, kissing your earlobe before he bites down on it, too. “Does it hurt?” he asks, voice throaty and hoarse. You feel his breath come in warm, labored puffs. He’s holding back, you realize, see his shoulders shaking and feel his nails digging into your wrists.
You arch your back and press your lips to the corner of his mouth, your tongue darting out to tease him, and pull away before he can deepen the kiss. “Not enough,” you whisper.
His next exhale is deep and rumbling. You hear the flick of him brandishing a pocket knife and when you look down, you meet his eyes glinting in the dark.
He wants to see if you’ll move, if you’ll beg him to stop.
You wouldn’t dream of it.
He holds your gaze as he plunges the knife into stomach, and you suck in a harsh breath at the moment the blade breaks the skin, shudder when you feel him pierce you. He leans in and laps at the blood, his tongue dipping into the wound he leaves behind, and you cry out and you writhe and you call his name.
“Again,” you whimper. “Please, more.”
Vincent gives a pleased grunt and drags the blade down through you, nibbling at your flesh wherever he intends to take it. He leaves bloody bites in your body, punctures and indents in the shape of his teeth. You beg for more and he bites down harder, tears through your flesh deeper than the knife. The discolored skin and raw marks he leaves behind are his words now, and he warns you not to get greedy, promises you he has more to give if you’ll be patient.
So you whisper his name again, you call out to him through the frenzied haze in his mind, you urge him on. You want it harder, you want it brutal if he’ll give that to you, cruel and painful and bloody. You want to look at yourself in the morning and wince when you press your fingertips to the wounds, want to remember getting lost in the pain of his bites and scratches, the fear of being devoured.
He runs the blade up your side and when you twist in anticipation, he releases your hands to hold you by the throat. He asks you—orders you—silently, with clouded eyes and a harsh squeeze of your neck, to stay still for him, to let him take you.
Then he lets go and replaces his hand with his teeth, clamps down on your throat, digs the knife in deeper, and you
are in love.
3.
Cain’s touch is gentle but his smile is cruel.
“Ah,” he says distractedly, though he pays close attention to your face, “it’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it?”
You squirm helplessly at the feather-light graze of his fingers down the center of your body. The sensation is pleasant but the look in his eye makes you think he’s daydreaming of slicing you open along the line he draws.
“Is it?” you ask hesitantly. You really aren’t sure; you’ve lost any sense of time while you’ve been here with him, day and night passing inconsequentially somewhere outside. You please him when he demands it, you eat when he feeds you, you rest when he allows it.
There is no time; there’s only Cain’s transient whims and your desire to live another day.
“You’d forgotten?” he teases. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. You might expect special treatment.”
You smile bitterly. “I wouldn’t dare.”
Cain seats himself beside you, and only then do you see the light glint off of the wicked curve of the blade in his hand. “You truly think so little of yourself? You could ask, you know. I might be feeling benevolent.”
You inhale sharply at the cold metal touching your bare skin, running up your arm. “Are you feeling benevolent?” you ask carefully.
His smile widens. He doesn’t answer the question. “A garden saw I full of blossoming boughs. Beside a river, through a green mead led; where sweetness evermore bountiful is, with flowers white, blue, yellow and red, and cold well-streams, nothing dead.” You stare up at him blankly and he chuckles at your confusion. “The Parliament of Fowls,” he informs you. “Chaucer.”
You shake your head helplessly, face flushing when he laughs at you again.
“Some claim it’s the first Valentine’s Day poem.” His tone is mocking.
“You don’t think so?”
“That doesn’t really matter, does it?” The blade dips into your skin with just the slightest push and you gasp, going still when your initial tensing only drives it in deeper. “Would it be less enjoyable if it wasn’t?” He leans over you as he slices across your chest, hands steady and precise, your body screaming in agony as you bite your lip hard enough to draw blood in an effort to stay still and silent. “Humans are sentimental about the strangest things. A rose, a bouquet of flowers, a box of chocolates; they don’t mean anything inherently, do they?”
“What do you care?” you shoot back. “They mean something to us. Just because you don’t know what love is doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t.”
Cain says nothing for a moment, unmoving as his eyes flick up to meet your gaze. The silence stretches on uncomfortably. When his smile returns with a sharper edge than before, you know you’ve made a mistake.
He drags the blade over to your left side, hovering above your rapidly-beating heart. You tremble when he starts to dig in deeper.
“What are you doing?” you ask nervously.
He ignores you. “The heart is the same way, isn’t it? You think this is where love is. You think this is where your feelings reside.”
His fingers tighten around the handle of the knife and he forces it deeper, scrapes against bone and tears through muscle. You hear him rip you open and see blood splatter over your skin and his hands.
“You seem rather confident that humanity’s collective delusions make you right somehow. So why don’t we find out?”
“N-no,” you stammer, choking on the word when he jams the blade in harder, sawing against your ribs.
He gouges a hole into your chest and wrenches a fistful of your flesh out of the way. You feel him breaking things, tearing things, hear the awful squelch of your organs rubbing together as blood spills from the wound and wets the sheets below you.
You feel him reach deep inside and spread his fingers before he closes his fists around something and squeezes, an agonizing pressure building inside of you.
“Strange,” he says, “I don’t see any love in here.”
He squeezes harder, harder, harder, and you hear something burst in his hand, wet and pulpy. The pain makes the world darken around you.
“But I don’t suppose I’d even know what it looked like, would I?”
Cain strokes your cheek with his bloodied hand and kisses your forehead. You’re afraid to close your eyes—you don’t think they’ll ever open again—but you’re too weak to fight the exhaustion that overcomes you.
He whispers, “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and licks shreds of your heart from his fingers.