Work Text:
Tyler doesn’t make it clear what he wants from me. He’s always there, close, but never close enough. It hurts, how close he is.
He’s great at torture. He’s made for it. Sometimes I can convince myself that maybe he doesn’t know that he’s doing it, but then he smiles like that, that way that he knows is charming and breathtaking and wholly unfair and I have to reevaluate. He’s made for torture.
It’s the curve of his muscles in his face. It’s hard to describe. They’re hard and defined and powerful. He’s unjustly beautiful, I think sometimes, and then I get the urge to punch myself.
It’s easier when he does it. Less strain on my wrist. Hard to get the right angle to punch myself.
When I said he doesn’t make it clear what he wants from me, I was lying. I’ve come to realise I do that a lot. Tyler knows I do. He uses it against me.
He makes it perfectly clear, I just refuse to see it.
His hand hovers over my tie and his breath ghosts my lips and I wonder for a second if he’s about to punch me, because that’s obviously the logical conclusion to the tension building up deep through my joints. Then he smiles, smirks but with glinting teeth, predatory and perverse and tragically beautiful and I forget that I’m even there, because what could possibly exist outside of that smile when it’s present?
But I do. And I find that incredibly unfortunate at times.
Tyler doesn’t play fair. It’s not like there are rules anyway, not for him. The rules are all his, and they’re all made to be broken.
He crowds me one moment, a different moment, my back to the stale refrigerator and his mouth at my ear. I think his teeth nip my earlobe but I can barely feel anything that isn’t his foot jamming on mine, his hand at my throat like a threat, my heart beating faster than I can think.
I am Jack’s anomalous coronary artery.1
“You want it. I know you do.”
He’s reached the point of frustration, where it’s stopped being torture for just me. He’s still having fun, he always is, but there’s something dangerous in his voice, something that makes me want to back up. I can’t. My back is against cold metal and the only escape is through him.
His mouth presses against the base of my chin right under my ear, open and wet and hot and unfairly gentle. I want to push him away, ask him what he thinks he’s doing. I don’t.
Gentle is what takes me aback. I don’t know what to do with gentle. Not from Tyler.
Tyler Durden does not do gentle.
He doesn’t stop and I don’t make him. He doesn’t move and neither do I. His lips shift against my jaw, like he’s whispering something he doesn’t want or care enough for me to hear. Then he’s gone.
I am Jack’s inflamed larynx.2
Tyler leans against my shoulder, half asleep with a faint upward tilt to his lips.
It’s not like we’ve never been here before. It’s just that usually it’s in some mundane public place; on a bus, in the backseat, sitting in a booth at some stupidly pretentious restaurant, the kind of place he hates. He does it for rebellion, for the looks people give as they pass by.
He doesn’t do this for comfort. He doesn’t do it for affection. He doesn’t care .
I’m forced to reevaluate. Tyler does that to me often. I never truly know him, not the way he knows me. I am predictable. He is wind blowing over a storm at sea. I’m mundane. He’s Tyler Durden.
The most significant thing for a mile in every direction is the rain pouring through the half-roof, but the rise and fall of his chest constitutes its own sensation. Not completely a feeling, not completely a sound. An odd in-between that’s all-consuming.
I get the urge to nudge the corner of his mouth down. He looks too peaceful, too content. Tyler Durden doesn’t do content.
(My fascination with Tyler’s mouth isn’t debilitating until it is.)
I don’t. He doesn’t move.
I don’t know I fall asleep until I wake up. He isn’t there, and I reevaluate.
Marla thinks I’ve completely lost it. She leans against the counter with a cigarette that I know smells better than it tastes, looking at me like I’m a hopeless wreck, and she isn’t wrong.
She and Tyler are never in the same room together unless they’re fucking. Loudly. Obscenely.
“You want him.”
It echoes something he said a while ago.
I am Jack’s incessant myokymia.3
“You want him and you don’t know what to do about it.”
I stare at her for a moment, but I don’t really see her. I see Tyler’s mouth. His smirk. His teeth. His hands on my neck.
Marla ticks up an eyebrow. My eye twitches again.
“It’s fucking sickening, you know,” she sneers, staring at some point past my head. The rotting wood of the cabinets, maybe. “The way he is about you.”
Her eyes snap to mine, and I want to punch my teeth in. Then hers right after, maybe. Rip her ten-cent sequined prom dress to shreds and set her on fire with her own lighter.
“I’ve asked him if you could join. Every time, every single time, he says—” there’s a pause, like it’s the most incredulous thing she’s ever heard, “—no!” Her voice rises an octave. “He says no! No, no, no. Never in a million years. It’s like he wants you to himself, or something. Selfish asshole.”
I continue to stare at her, and she frowns. “What? Do I have something on my face?” she asks, but doesn’t move to check.
When I don’t reply, she scoffs softly, grabs her coat and stalks off. She leaves her cigarette on the counter, still burning, and my eyes flicker to it. The house seems to rattle when she closes the door.
She knows I’m predictable, too.
I don’t know how much time passes as I stare at the cigarette, but when Tyler comes in it’s burnt out. I don’t know how long it’s been out for.
He grins a bit at me, ruffles my hair, doesn’t even notice the cigarette on the counter. Doesn’t see the red-hot imprint her body heat leaves against it. I look at him, and suddenly I don’t either.
I am Tyler’s broken little bitch.4
My lip’s split and my head is in the process of doing the same. Tyler looks no worse for wear. In fact, he looks invigorated. He looks like he’s never felt better. He’s grinning like it’ll split his face in two.
I’m gonna split myself in two, right down the middle. He probably wouldn’t even clean it up if I did. Just leave me here to decompose with the failing wooden floor.
He holds a towel to my bleeding lip and I wonder for a moment if he’d kiss it better. It wouldn’t be the first time. If I bruise my jaw, my collarbone, my arms, my chest, he’d kiss it better. I’d tell him mildly that my wrist hurts, and he'd bring it up to his lips and press a lingering kiss. It’s terrible. I don’t ever stop him.
Tyler’s saying something about fighting, maybe telling me that my left hook is unsightly (it is), but I don’t know anything past his teeth. They probably aren’t glinting. That wouldn’t make sense.
He’s close all of a sudden, close enough that I can’t see his teeth, that all I can see really are his eyes.
“Are you even listening to me?”
I think for a moment to lie but I don't. “No.”
There’s a pause where he gets impossibly closer. My mouth tastes like blood. I imagine his tastes like all the shit he eats to grin like that.
“Good.”
Nothing can be good when he’s so close. He’s not close enough. Fuck.
I notice the rag he’d had to my face falls somewhere near my lap or on the ground. His hand is at my collarbone instead, pressing into already-forming bruises yellow and green and purple. They’re not his focus, though.
It’s a bone-chilling sight to see, a completely single-minded Tyler Durden.
He grins like a threat. His teeth are threatening. The curve of his mouth is threatening. His eyes are sharp, fierce, possessive.
He doesn’t taste like shit the way I’d hypothesised but the blood flavour was too overpowering either way.
He doesn’t kiss the way I thought he would either, but I don’t think about that often. Best not to think when it comes to what you feel about Tyler Durden.
He kisses like I mean something to him. He kisses like I’m the only thing that means anything to him. He kisses like there’s nothing else, he kisses with reckless abandon, he kisses with adoring reverence. He kisses me like that, I manage to think vaguely, because he doesn’t kiss Marla like that.
Otherwise, Marla would be in love with the conniving bastard.
My hands are up his bloody tank (my own blood, mostly), his are through my hair and at my neck and at my waist and everywhere they shouldn’t be, everywhere they have to be.
Tyler Durden kisses me like I’m precious to him.
I reevaluate.
1. An anomalous coronary artery (ACA) is a coronary artery that has an abnormality or malformation. May cause symptoms such as chest pain or fainting with exercise, or abnormal heart rhythms.
(Return to text.)
2. When your larynx (voice box) becomes inflamed, your vocal cords become swollen. Laryngitis is commonly caused by viral infection or by straining or overusing your voice. Symptoms may be a low, hoarse voice, difficulty speaking, sore throat, mild fever and an irritating cough.
(Return to text.)
3. Myokymia is the most common type of eye twitching. A twitch or spasm that can involve either the lower or upper eyelid.
(Return to text.)
4. There’s nothing medical about it. It’s harsh, thoughtless, primal.
(Return to text.)