Fine Lines

by Alexander

Your father believes you are such a good boy, and you are, but in ways he doesn't imagine or will ever know.

Not the way I know you.

You're good the way a ripe peach is good when my teeth burst through the smooth skin, good the way a watermelon is good when its taut shell opens easily under the slice of my blade. You are the first warm, heavy drops of a summer rain splashing against my feverish skin. You are an exotic drink on my tongue, piquant like balsamic vinegar and yet sweet as sherry, filled with the taste of copper and something indefinable that makes my stomach feel heavy and twist. You are opium.

"I think too much," you say. "It never stops. Never."

I don't answer. Your honey-colored expanse is before me, lovely tone, shifting and twitching in quiet fright. Drawn as if for quartering, tethered to all four bedposts; unmarred, perfect, and smooth. Beautiful.

The soft lilt of your voice caresses my ear, like the whisper of silk tickling the tiny hairs on my skin, raising goose-bumps. "Make it stop."

Kneeling between your legs, I curve my hands around your knees, my fingertips tracing circles on the soft skin of the backs of them. You give a slight start as if electrocuted, and I smile at my discovery. "How?"

"Tell me a story that'll take me away. Far away with you."

I move up to lean over your face and the sooted valance of your lashes lifts. You freeze as my fingernails rake trails of ice over the insides of your arms, and I silently watch the pools of black in your eyes flare, compressing the irises into blazing coronas, amber as a hunter's moon.

"I'll write you a story," I say. "Tell me what you want."

"I can't. It's..."

You fall silent and I kiss your lips again and again, softly, until a sharp nip of my teeth pierces you, makes you gasp against my open mouth. I already know: I taste it on the tip of your tongue, on the surge of your breath, flowing into my heart and down my spine like molten lava, a conflagration of need. "Tell me."

Tell me how much you love me....

Your eyes close as I kiss you, draw it out of you bit by bit and let you breathe it into me, fragments of speech barely audible were it not for the keen hearing of my soul. "You..."

"Yes," I prompt, whispering against your mouth. "How?"

"Sensual... erotic..."

"Yes..."

"Savage... cruel..."

My fingertips trace fine lines of silvery scars on the velvet canvas of your flesh, strewn here and there, visible only to me, truculent prose waiting to be over-written and eradicated forever. "...bloody?"

Show me how much you love me, child....

You start to pant, writhing sinuously underneath me. "Yes."

It's never far from me, the instrument you love me to penetrate you with almost more than any other, because I'm the only one you allow to do so. My eyes hold yours, watching you watch me as I test the blade. The cold hard tip pierces the pad of my thumb easily. I let you catch the growing sanguine bead on your tongue, shivering at the hard suction as you draw a rivulet of me into your mouth, kissing you after, the blade flat on your stomach.

Your breath comes in huffs and soft moans, but you hold perfectly still for me while I write you a story on the parchment of your skin. Twisting and coiling outwards from your navel flow spirals and waves, a soliloquy about souls, questing, finding, probing. Fluid curves and curls adorn your arms, intertwining in a narrative of mad passion, ever tighter as the lines are drawn nearer to your wrists, and I carve my name into the palms of your hands. Sharp-edged, asymmetric polygons cover your legs, seamlessly interlocking in convoluted designs--the times you attempted to run from me but I don't let you go--and the lines become softer again as they wind over your hips, meeting the whorls on your belly in joyous curlicues like musical notes, the lyrics of a certain song.

First welts rise. Then, slowly, inch by inch, I cut into you, and beads of blood rise like strings of coral pearls, changing my hieroglyphics from shallow scratches into inscriptions of a deeper truth. I underscore the narrative with my thoughts and contemplations of you that describe radiant beauty, brilliance, the strength of your integrity and the warmth of your love. You groan and shiver as I follow the etchings with my tongue, the hot sting letting my message resonate under your skin, drinking you in while the story that was in my heart burns into your living flesh, marking it as my own.

The knife clatters to the floor after the final punctuation point is made and I kiss you deeply, the oddly compatible taste of adrenaline and blood blending in our mouths, a metallic amalgamation of life that's like a rush of an intoxicant. You whisper in my ear that I have all of you and you're mine; the impassioned love I incised into you flows over your lips and back at me as if you can't contain it all.

I'll never let you go.