#forever obsessed with this little freak | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

edenspoem · 16 days ago

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𝐧𝐨 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧.

summary. ★ ┆ in this numbing winter wood guarded by her hunting-adroit family, ellie believes she is safe. but her tracking methods are not so familiar with the intelligence and vigilance of sadistic creatures—of invisible kinds. reader discretion heavily advised. ★ ┆ dark content (not dubcon/noncon, think of murder, manipulation and abuse), smut, angst, horror, major character death, prey!hunter!ellie x predator!vampire!reader (prey and predator dynamic, the kink is sort of involved), enemies to lovers to enemies again, apocalypse au, lore-centered, flashbacks from centuries ago, ellie is almost a dead-ringer lover, religious references, biting, blood sucking, reader is a bit of a stalker (vampire behavior), reader is an undeniable evil, gunshot wounds (she thought guns would work), bites don't turn people here, forbidden romance with a touch of corruption; starts out sweet, ends up ugly, one instance of physical abuse (that is not endorsed. it is shamed), arguments occur, relationships with wayward and delusional vampires are not for those who fall easy—and deeply. ellie for sure isn't thinking when it comes to you; reader is the first to touch her (she has freaked other girls but never received freak reciprocation, if you catch my drift), sub!leaning!ellie, fingering (e!r!receiving), oral(e!receiving), tribbing, masturbation, subtle overtones of masochism, drugging (with herbal tea, and for reasons that aren't violation), neck and hand fixations, slashing, victim blaming, ellie tends to sub here but energies do match. memo. ★ ┆ here comes a very long-awaited fic (circa five months ago). tried to make this one as long as i could to percolate the tension. expect bittersweetness. actual blood sweat and tears went into this thing i think. info. ★ ┆ wc: 10.9k proofreaders: @baptismbaby, @elstattoo, @meganegatari, @vifilms (thanks to each one of you for ur commentary!) masterlist. discord. palestine masterpost.

𝐇𝐔𝐍𝐓

Guns will not save you, sweetheart.

There she is. Sweet opalescent girl, woolen in gear from head to toe, scrunching her nose and squinting her eyes out in the winter clearing, the girl you have long pursued. You are watching her. Chasing her, silently.

The grove is dense where snow slipped down to die.

She sticks close to her mechanical savior: a coal black rifle up in her arms like a swaddled babe. It befits her act tremendously. She, a human solely, would not want to penetrate this forest every sacred Sunday without her guns. They have provided her plenty. Pelts, savory meats, skulls above the fireplace, fabricated potential. Some guns even go as far as scoring her family the thinning rations of a sorry trespasser.

But they will not save her.

She knows somebody—or something, is out there. Lurking in alder, hounding in spectacularly painted shade. You can tell her treading is expectant, and alert. Even the way in which she points her gun is inviting. But, on the other side, a paradox invites you.

She is paranoid. Paranoid people are alert, but easy targets. Vampires feed on easy. She hears everything in paranoia; she hears her muscles shift. Bones scrape. Eyes wake. Heart race.

But, of course, never you.

Lastingly, a forever has passed; the Millers have bid no farewell to their scriptural, woodland acreage, and never plan to. So, graciously, your recent years have been ones of watching. After all, you do have all the time in the world, so you spent some learning about this girl in the blind spots she's oblivious to. The romanticism of her not knowing you, or your presence, is that you know nearly everything about her. Much about that is to be smiled over. Even the memorable, quaint little name she has.

Ellie.

And, for a lasting time, she has been your unrequited wife of obsession.

Gorgeous girl. Thin, smart, a labyrinth of limbs and sunspots and reclused words. Hibernates in her room, as far as you can tell. She always has these interludes of solitude, cried on by sunlight, and you linger by the window whenever so. Invisible, of course, but there. Observing how long it takes a human of artistic design to perfect a mere stroke. Once on the canvas, twice, and thrice over. And sure, she ceases seclusion some days to help in pastoral tendings, hunting and patrol; but she always crawls back inside her little paintings, and shuts the hinges on relatives. She is a protagonist of silence.

No lovers, little friendships, a small existence in a small room. Alone, as of late. Never too fond of wayfaring strangers that trickle in like maple seeds. And yet today you have herded her, silenceless, to the throat of this thick forest. Confused by the sounds it produces.

“Where the fuck am I?” she grumbles to herself, voice husky under her snared lip. The intricacies of her gun creak as she points in restless circles, aiming the long spire everywhere. She is inclined to kill the next noise. “Swear to god, if that bunny ran off already..” For a second, she looked like she wanted to bail and forget about it. But a heavy sigh falls, and the reluctance in her body goes cold. “Too deep now, Ellie. Gotta come back with somethin'.”

She is desirably late; the bunny in question is already disposed in a berry bush off the white avenue. You had to be quick, as she is too. It's almost impressive. Rather than her invigilance in sleep, or solstices of the day, you prefer her now.

Running.

Yes, a strange fixation—you are wary. However, where is the thrill in feeding if not in the chase? This is tradition.

Wonder how sweet she is.

“Shit.” Her startled whisper blurts at a spitting distance, not that far. Careful footsteps crunch in your ear. “Who got you?” You left a ribbon of blood on the ground for her to find, which she did, and now she is investigating it. This opens her up.

From your place, you could lunge and snare her now. Bite her, even. Nothing inhibits you, and her flesh is singing to you, but you want to wait. My, that invigorating sound of her blood rushing and her heart thumping. You often listened in by her windows, speculating what occurred based upon the volume; a healthy and vicious rhythm was rage, and you fucking loved the sound of her rage. It gulps the mind. Pounds the somnolent heart.

Even inches away, you can hear it.

Scent is markedly a distant world, though. All these hardships at home; you can smell the regret outside her window sill. Alcohol, sweat, wounds. Those are the main ones you use to track her, and heed the elusive, perfect moments to leave trinkets for her.

Flora, odd bones and bits—guns off the usual unsuspecting victim. You often killed things with your own two hands, and dragged them over for her, too. Makes her the lesser hunter, huh?

There is a revolver stashed in her waistband, one you left for her.

“Not seein' anything out here,” she rasps.

Pocket knife, too. She came prepared, just not for you. With her focus swallowed, and mind inside of her gun, you stroll up from behind. Your hand plants on her shoulder before she can brace herself.

“Looking for something?” The question makes her snap around, but you behave like light.

Shoving her into the crisp ground goes smoothly, but not without a first impression. A gunshot is cracked from her rifle before you can disarm her of it. When you manage to, she flits into flight mode. Violent protests writhe under you.

Her pale face is screaming red. “Fuck! Get the hell off me!” Milk and roses, like the rest of her. She pounds her fists into your chest.

She is not easy. She is a rainstorm under your control. You have to put the weight of the world on her to chastise and limit the struggle, pinning her wrists into the snow and straddling. This subdues her, given your vampiric stamina, and your nose has never been closer. Her neck—a secodont temptation in human flesh. The scent filling you makes you laugh delightedly.

Her soft pink mouth is slightly agape, and filtering cold breath in your face. It envelops your eyes, fogs up her features, yet watching it enter, and leave her lips, fascinates you. Love is a rooting thing; you look once, and you never want to stop looking.

“Hey pretty eyes,” you allure, honey escaping your throat instead of venom. You never sound this sweet. “What are you doing so far from home?”

Ellie appears clueless to your nature. Rather, what things lie inside your mouth—sharp, and starving things. She flickers her eyes like a violent womb over your face, your blinkless eyes, and mentions nothing of it. Therefore, besides this being an obvious first encounter with a vampire, she won't expect it. Not like she can combat it, really; your strength precedes you.

Her chords tremble quietly, angrily, brows anchored low. “Fuck are you doing?”

Experiencing her voice so close and so personal makes you visceral. Lust enshrouds. “Hunting.. gathering..” you fade into a seductive coo, lips rolling over her neck. “Same as you.” Muscles in it flinch when you steal a short stroke with your tongue. Every part of her flinches.

Disgust then crosses her expression, and she blurts, “Are you a fucking cannibal?” Turning her head away. This only exposes her ripe neck more.

Either your tone, or the fact that you might be a flesh-eating killer, lifts her heart into her throat; pulses thump against your lips, so intoxicatingly. You want them in your mouth, in your memory. Somewhere they can exist and nurture you forever. “Mhh, so close.” You try to give her a hint by scraping your fangs along her sensitive carotid.

It seems to work.

She whimpers.

This was it, in her shallow mind. Eternal rest is calling, and she has nothing but her paintings and thoughts alone to rot without her. Ellie would die and have to bear the winter sun as her witness—her only witness. God, her heart breaks just thinking: Joel will be confused. Tess will send a rescue team for a corpse, and Joel will be lost when he has nobody to give the ol' regulation lecture to. Nobody to be a worried, old man for. Simply because of something she thought only existed in fiction and fairytales. How fucking rich!

“Fuck you!”

The night has a thousand eyes, and the day has but one.

You comb three attentive fingers into her hairline, and tip her head back. The gesture is too gentle for how ugly, mangled and sanguinolent the bole of her breaths is to be made. You are too gentle doing this. Scraping your teeth, wetting her skin; you have the social grace of a sycophant, and the conduct of a lover. Eat her whole, why don't you? She is your apple to keep. Eat, eat, eat.

You crumple the sage collar of her jacket, whispering, “Hold still for me, huh?” Quiet, and cold as the forest she relies on. As your opening lips.

And that is just what she does. Tighten as your teeth sink, motionless as these very trees. When you take her blood inside, you find her absolutely celestial. And you carve your teeth into her like she is a pietistical mural to make impure. Dying as a falling angel, she squirms. The penetralia of her throat is the main thing moving: tensing muscles, swallows pushing out a river of subtle, pained sounds. Crimson breaks, and draws in lithe lines down the base. Stains the crossroads of your sucking lips.

You make a soft-spoken voice crawl out of her. “Fuck,” she curses. Her teeth leap from her plush lip, and stay open. You imagine the pain is a gentle torture for your inexperienced victim. You are feeding on a sensitive silhouette, and she is staring up, quietly at the thistle drapings above. Misty-eyed, probably. Fingers tugging on your clothes just the way you need them to.

Blood thickens as your composure thins. She tastes sickeningly sweet. There is a pure hideosity reaching under your chin and down to your collarbones, because your hunger is beginning to precede you. Some ancient, voracious and cacodaemoniacal thing is wanting, and wanting hard. From your throat, from the cavity of your torso; somewhere desperate. Wherever it is, it wants a deep mouthful of Ellie, and you aren’t morally-deposed to take her to that dark there quite yet.

Your hungry grunt stifles. She has gone soft and pliant now and is holding your arm. As a grounding measure, you think, but it sends a pricking through your spine.

“Mhh,” you hum, slowly extricating from the side of her neck. Stronger gushing flows from the holes left behind as if the wound was crying in ease. Heaven, crying.

The cracked partings of her mouth shudder around a soundless gasp, and she reaches for the intrusion you left. Something was given and something was lost; she feels the raised punctures. Gets blood on the precious tips of her fingers. Lets her still-alive pulse hit against her palm. You took from her lifeline, and left a cruel epilogue.

Are you truly this savoring with it?

Maria said that something was out there—something uglier than infected. Creatures lie dead rampantly, and in cryptic, clean ways that denote sentient procedure. Nothing a brainless, living dead would have the capacity to do. So now that she has drawn you, a secret world exposed, snapped like bone, she has to say something. Do something. Joel drilled that incentive.

It knocks her into fleeing like fucking hell.

As in any exciting, horrific prologue, it begins in a scatter. Ellie clambers with milk knuckles in the self-same snow, grappling to slide out from under you, and manages a slim much. Her countenance is kneeled eyes and a gaping mouth, puffing clouds every which way. The face of escape; as if she had woken in a surrounding of her own blood, which is an embroidered, but hovering truth.

You watch with an empty one. She stands up and wrestles the approaching mist for her disposed handgun, flecking up snow with her footsteps as she dashes.

Adrenaline flees with her. If she is wise, a search team will be enlisted after your whereabouts. Carnage will break in these white woods an evening hence, under vacant cover of night, and she will no doubt be a curious murderer; searching for you under a false sense of safety, in the grove here.

But if you are wise, you will be there. Waiting for her.

𝐍𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋

Evening begins in a whimper.

Or in sequences of them.

Troops shall not be drawn out, she decided. It grates her to sift this weight of knowing, this imperative information. But she is a waking potential, who has slipped her head under a crossroad and found a world of gnashing. She does not want to be the girl who cried vampire.

Well, winter is tired now. Snowfall has whirled, died, and crepuscule has crept in through the window sill. Everyone succumbed to it, except for her; still awake, still remembering. Hunched on her bed, she wads an alcohol-dredged cotton ball to the sickly white punctures on her neck, sipping harshly through her teeth. Stings like a fucking bitch. “Shit.”

But why is she still alive?

Ellie still feels the shape of your teeth in her neck. Skin flushing and pumping around them, or engraving some sort of scriptural curse. It was not painful, so much as it pained like death to think she would die. But she is here, and she feels misplaced. Watched, her faith in safety loosening.

The cotton ball is agitatedly discarded into a drawn-out trash bin, littered by all the cotton fumbled before. She pushes up at the knees and drags her ankles into the bathroom, fingers already reaching for the sink.

“Just gotta sleep this off, Ellie.” The faucet cries, its gentle stream pouring right into her asking palms. She uses it to splash her eyes, fingers rubbing around them to wipe the water away. Rinse, and unlearn the memory.

Try, at least.

She needs solacing rest. Forest duties will call her name in the youngest morning, and without a shroud of doubt, will be the warm, shepherding drawl of her father. She is fortunate enough to hang from him, his good name, who is the least bit hard on her. But others—such as her in-a-sense, patrolaholic aunt—would reproach him for his tender loving.

So, to cut the bullshit, she tries to lead a responsible life. Before, it was imprudence plentiful. But taking the inebriation, the heartbreakers, and the snuck-in cannabis out of her grasp has led her somewhere good. Somewhere she can feel like a worthwhile girl in one fucked up socket of the world. It seems to be valuable; she holds the highest count of infected shot in a single patrol.

Her concentration is immeasurable.

But she begins to doubt her resilience as she stares into the center of her sullen eyes.

She snags her lip to the left, contemplating. Ellie is alive for a reason. She fucked up; forgone each principle of the forest, of the hunt, omitting the signs and senses that beheld her in the stout snow. Yet, here she is, flesh in the mirror. And something else clicks: the inescapable leaving of unusual objects on her window sill face trial too. All that clattering and scratching at walls she thought was a rodent seems to align with it pretty well. Not to mention the disembodied touchings of her head and hair in deep-sleep dreamings, and awoken to in chapel-cold sweats to find nothing there.

It distressed her mind: how long should a human wonder, until it is lethal?

She concludes with the idea of a stalker.

Fucking vampire stalker.

It introduces a shiver. “Okay.” One she has to pursue genuine warmth for; she crosses her arms and kills the bathroom light, the ends of her fingers lingering up her sleeves as she crosses the threshold. Between a introspective bathroom, and an infiltrated bedroom.

Neither are soft with the home; its safe wood walls, weeping willow scents, and inborn temperatures. She is open to the outside. She is the centerpiece for the thousand eyes of night. Cold, bare. The bed welcomes her weight in a billowing hollow for her body—yet, is the most unsettling thing she has slipped against her skin. The question of whether you manifest on this meaningful night, or let your eluding presence delude her into searching for it, begs for sleep before it can transfigure into an answer.

Her quiet, petal-soft lids droop closed. Trying to sleep conceives like death; it’s as if the air seeping her bedroom is a miasma, each breath in getting her drowsier and drowsier. Soon, all sound fades, and the inhibition whether or not hunger will find you at this crescent of night, and on her pale neck, is forgotten.

Time is forgotten.

𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐖𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐃

This is where she nestles—dreams. Pretty, isn’t she?

She is water and the way it settles. She is poetry scribed in the summer month of June, feeding on its younger, more innocent, springtime chassis in which it longs to return to. Gentle petrichor, plush skin, and lashes of an auburn fire. She is beautiful; but much harrowing is to be combed inside, underneath.

Dreams and pain lulled you. But after you first sought her, watching over her in the deepest sleep on the most painful of nights, it became ritual for a farther reason:

You fell in love. Again; love is a rooting thing; you look once, and you never want to stop looking.

Never.

Seams adore and finish the girl with eliciting interest. Low-cuts under the arms, in between the legs; it leaves less frou-frou and forest to the imagination than raised with. She really is auburn all over. She really, really is. You could not desire it any different. Peek-ins to temporal changes—when she strips plaid from pale and peels rough, woven blue and button from her muscled hips—excited you before, and they excite you now. Flesh has never been dangled in front of you as it’s in this time.

An arm is slackly risen above her pillow, and she clads a sleeveless. You can see it; the autumn forest.

But the instinct to protect, and nurture from her is worse now. And with the precedes of last afternoon—yesterday, the first of her blood taken into your vitals—you feel evermore lustful for it, leading you here at the foot of her bed. She looks peaceful now: unlatched lips, ribs that swell and wane, moon-shine on her neck. Your eyes land, in particular, on the sleeping shape of her fingers, curling slightly into her palm, which is against lilac-colored sheets.

Gods, she has the sweetest, speechless gesture of telling you where to bite.

You sidle upon the edge, tucking both legs and straightening both arms into a slow crawl until you reach that hand. It, limp at the wrist, delicately fits in yours, and you take it to your teeth.

Before you intruded her somnolent skin and trickling veins with your lust, you admired the feel of her freckled flesh against your lips. The hairs there tickled. The scent made you feen; a heavenly sigh stretching through your throat. And that sigh led your mouth open.

You bite the apple.

She slowly creaks awake—the hinges of her eyes fluttering with a slow, white surprise. “Uhn—what the?” And when she notices, they blow wide with an olive ring. “Fuck!”

She stumbles up on her bottom. The wrist in your mouth supplied you a sip of blood before it was ripped from you and fled in excretions of that crimson nectar—wasted. It stains her sheets. Writes the event in blood. Crucifies the affrighted face of the auburn girl who grips her leaking wrist with a pressure you can hear tighten.

And she bleeds, and she bleeds—and you watch.

Like a lover.

You fawn, pouting all sick-and-sweet. “You know you could injure yourself more. Doing that.” It contorted a sicker-looking sharpness in her glare; staring from under her pricked brows. You unwind, and reach for her, “Here, let me.” But she flinches, a fitting punishment for a monster.

“Who are you?” She sounds instinctive, grit in her tone. “And what the fuck do you want with me?” The old, frightened-lamb act of her afternoon self seems to have diminished, painting her a volatile violence. She weaponizes her eyes; lacerates your red ribbon secrets into a bleed. Tries to, at least.

You never made it simple.

Well then, resilience it is. Quite stunning when she stomachs it up from her throat—a pretense swollen from hiding. Perhaps, this relenting will entertain you more. “Mmm, a secret admirer,” you intone, limning circles on the bed with your pointer. Then, you remember the situation, and chuckle. “Not so secret anymore though, I suppose.”

She looks the least bit impressed.

You still your finger, sighing. “Right.” And you plummet sights upon the silent, clothing-riddled carpet in spontaneous thought.

Her stare wanted to carve an entire confession out of you, and unfortunately—your truth is ancient, and incomprehensible. Not the safest knowledge for humans. But seeing as she said a precise ‘who’ are you, and not a ‘what’ are you, implies she knows enough not to require too much more. Eager to soften her, though, the portion she carves is a thimbleful of sugar; a sweet, harmless idea.

It starts with breath filling your windpipes. “Infected make life impossible, but you already understand that perfectly fine. At least on your end of things.” You squint, contorting the somethings of a musing expression.

She gulps, and it pulls her lids with it into a pensive blink.

“We vampires, on the other hand, have it so desolate.” Your voice is softly crawling inside of her. “It makes us desperate.”

Her brows narrow. “So, you still feed on unsuspecting victims?”

“Well, is that not just the naturalistic nature of vampires?”

“Tch,” she scoffs, kneeling up from the bed. “Fucking pathetic.” Her footpath to the window is sharp. The latch clangs under her finger, and the panes are palmed open, swallowing inside the cold airs of the forest. “Now, if you don't mind—could you get the fuck out?”

You cock your head and immerse. To her, you are a thorn in the flesh; some creature she did not invite into the home of her body, and certainly not her life. You staring at her makes her want to rip out of her skin.

“What, am I supposed to empathize with you or some shit?” Her hand casts out, shrugging at you with a disinclination she conjectures as obvious. “No fuckin’ way.” It drops to her thigh.

Thus, you relapse. The mind bends into itself and what it sees is springtime—her most earning months, and you, victorious to have earned her heart that is caged. Being aware of her nature made it easier done than said, but you have your secret stash of lilies; your thornless guise. You want it to be real. You would utter anything for it to be real.

“You're lonely,” you blurt, smooth and seductive, evocative of the moonlit shadow you sit sedentary in. Tension is born in a confounded gulp from her you hear so clearly. “You starve for some sort of company, right?”

She tuts, stares off. “Not with you.”

“Who else?”

You prick a nerve.

And her countenance seems eager to linger: lips tugging over her teeth in such a simmering fashion—so you begin again.“See—Ellie, I myself am quite alone too—”

“‘Course you know my fuckin’ name.”

“I know you watch the stars every night. For a reason, too.”

She softens at the mouth. What you said gets her skin raised; it has nothing to do with the original conversation, yet makes an eerie sense. Of course you know.

Bring up space, and she is all ears.

“Did you ever wonder how alone they are, too? Big, blindingly bright things in the sky that yet have an eternal cling to the empty, cold nothingness?” Your voice reflects the poignant contents. And in that poignant, in-between silence, your stares are battling each other. “I know it well. It drives you to rather deplorable things.”

She still says nothing. Her eyes are shifting with a million things she could, but she casts them aside and settles her lids.

“You know too.”

The sound creases her brows.

Hopeful creatures prance in the night. It is night; you are a creature. The bed rustles with your hopeful movement—legs pouring from the edge to the floor, and drifting your way over with so much as a quiet prance. You intend not to scare her, or harm her, but to persuade her of your good—in other words, ambivalent—will and soul. “Think of my feedings as a special little hello. I don't regularly interact with the human world as much as I fend from it.”

Ellie repositions herself along the sill when you join her, a chastened flinch.“Huh.” She crosses her arms. “Okay. But, like—what do you want outta’ this?” she questions, and her brows have a stronger downpour when she espies you; clenched, cautious things.

“Sanctuary.”

Her breath groans. “English, please?”

“I speak as you do.”

“Wh—okay well,” Her tongue stumbles. Articulation is never her strong suit, unless it is an articulation of rage. She pinches the bridge of her nose, crumpling her inner-eyes and pitches herself to the window, leaning on it. “Forgot you're like fuckin’ ancient, probably.”

You thought you forgot how to laugh—but there it springs, the age-old sound. And you expect her to be offended because of it, but she eyes you in her hung position without a crack in her expression. Nothing-faced. Throat cold and tongue soft; this must be what compliance looks like. If it is, then it’s all you need.

Self-indulgence steals you. You enclose the warmth of her hand in your palm, and shape it like an alcove. Her rough skin made for a captivating texture.“Smart girl.”

You expected her to scoff—least of all, to blush, and conceal it by turning to the paned, outside world—scoffing.

Tingles run down your spine.

“So, am I granted?”

Ellie blankly snaps her head from the window. She blinks for a couple beats. “Huh?”

“To stay here—it’s what I was asking of you before.” You take a step forward, prudent and slow. Her soundless mind made you preclude; you cannot read it, but you understand where her heart is and its sensibilities. She is logical, she wants reasons. Chances are, her response will be apprehensive, and you intend to reel it out without it snagging on the gentle inside. You need to be on her level. “Housing is scarce and less sustainable than it ever has been. Surprise, surprise.”

She also loves sarcasm.

“Tch—” She straightens her spine, slipping in a fleeting smile. “What’s wrong with where you live now?”

“The others are all heartsores,” you deplore, tone elongating. “Groaning on and on about tradition and ethics.”

“By others, I’m going to assume you mean.. other vampires?”

“Indeed.”

The conversation interludes with a sigh, deep in her chest. She covers it with her arms crossed. The question then seems to fester; her lips rub together without an answer—but more thinking, and then her eyes thread up through another inhale. “Fine,” she says. With a heart softened. “Guess an invisible roommate wouldn’t be so bad.” Loneliness has convinced her. The window locks shut with a clack, a flick of her fingers. “My blood is one-hundred percent off-limits, though.” She shoots you a half-serious, half-sarcastic face—intending one over the other.

“Ah,” you wince, bending at the knees to accentuate your comment. “But it’s so sweet.”

And she cringes at it, but with faux mirth; a guarded, disgusted chuckle. “Don’t say that, either.”

You heed her wish with a small sound, “Hm.” and a mirrored smile. The sentence itself feels as though it will become repertoire. Several things do. The events here today are a stain, a crimson, violent-smelling one that cannot be washed out.

You hear the sound of fabric shifting. “Take the couch.” An indigo, plaid wool blanket is stripped from her bed, and chucked onto the quaint window-seat across, which is satin-like with moonlight; an edgeless, dull gleam reaching for it. It drapes with erratic procedure. “Don’t leave my room, don’t leave the house during the day, and don’t drag in any dead animals..”

“Do you think me uncouth?”

“Well—ugh.” She pinches her eyes together. Then, she rolls her head around.“You know what I mean. Just act like a human and don’t get fucking caught.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

She huffs. “Good.”

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐓

She promised you it was off-limits.

But still it persisted. The ancient hunger, the memories of her inside.

Humanity can be a limiting thing.

There, a conflict was born. You could eat from any tree you wanted. Tear it apart, watch it foam at the mouth for mercifulness. Nothing—not a thing that is tangible—is stopping you, or stopped you in the past. So, what meaning does that conviction hold when you spot the most beautiful, available, and abundant tree; beautiful with her freckles, available in her sleep, and abundant with the thing she lives on to survive and you drink to survive?

The indolent sound would not leave. It would not soften, it would not climb.

It would flow, and flow mercilessly.

It was upon her bed the night she resigned. “Fine,” she sighed, and it was said so softly in spite of the original promise. Time around you had softened her. “Just a little, right?”

But even as it left her lips, her fingers were reluctant in folding up the hem of her sleeve. You noticed the careful pace. The second thoughts in her eyes, whispering to her fingers that this would be a potential regret, and soon a routine. The implications in her features scrunched as she watched you come closer.

“Just a little,” you reaffirmed. You kissed that node in her wrist with it, too. “Nothing more.”

The moon hung a little past three in the morning when she was up, and you were hungry. Slightly hungry. Soft urges are enough a reason.

Sensations were high that night. Teeth buried into her leather-cushion skin and it felt like a velvet drug; Ellie loathed and loved, whined and writhed for you. It fed you and silenced her. That is a sanctioned schedule. You would drink it in a this-or-nothing, soft-fondling manner and she would give it past midnight—all nights. Most times, sleep would befall, and she would need your voice to guide her awake before you decided to feed. As long as you are in accordance with time, place, health and spectation—she never minds.

Weeks flowed, and it persisted.

“You have a strange-ass routine. ‘M still not used to this,” she laughed, bolstering fatigue in her tired eyes that fluttered. Down, and down.

Perhaps you loved opportunities.

Her skin fits tight and warm in your mouth; alive and pulsing and ever so whistling blood. It was no longer massacres under your lip, it was clean, and she made little sound—besides when she had something dull to weigh in.

Your lips sutured together, imbibing that last stria of delicate red. “Me?” you pitched, and secondly smiled as her laugh riled it in you. “You wake at this hour regardless for inessential nothings. You are strange.”

She scoffed with character. “What?” And had it in her to laugh a little louder—praying it didn’t bleed outside the room: that and the beheaded nonsense. “The only reason I get up this early is because I have.. shit to do, people to feed..” She crinkled her nostrils and sniffled.

“Taking care of yourself for me?”

“Uh, what makes you think that?”

“Your skin tastes of honey,” you declared this alongside your caressing fingers, rolling over the fresh wound, the honey skin in question. It met like silk. “Do you want to impress the impressed?”

Either it was your question muddling her—or your statement and its ring of truth, that made her features crinkle up.“No?” Such a failured liar. She conserved not a clue about the accumulating chaos in her bathroom, whom she had no mind other than hers to blame: herbs all around, sweet liquids, ingredients you find in self-made soaps but nonetheless in heaps and scattered. She thought you were clueless to it. She tip-toed around it. “Fuck, is this just you wracking my brain again with your weird phrases and your.. old—”

“Don’t play dumb with me, darling.”

Her cheeks seemed to redden on the spot.

This unadulterated sweetening to her flesh was a decision. Raw, home-harvested honey that she lathers to sanctity herself—or satisfy you. It added up to this this little, unspoken—but traceable—secret she had slipped into, though exposed; she hadn’t treaded the feeling in years. You saw her, heard it beat in attempts to catch up with her running thoughts.

She likes you.

Her behavior reminded you of your darling years abounding the Enlightened Age: in love with a pair of frilly, fern eyes that often wandered, and robin-bellied hair: a girl who roamed the court with gut and courage, but could not pave it through the same.

You loved her.

But she was taken from you.

Ellie mumbled,“Not dumb,” with her mouth under her fingers and pupils disengaged. She wiped at the corner with the crook of her thumb until she thought of something else. The tone was written on her face beforehand. “Just being.. considerate?” She knew it wasn’t the right one. So, she laughed and spared you her timid stare, shrugging. “Dunno’. You tell me.”

You laughed too, scornful. But not harsh. “Bit of a brat today, huh?”

Staying acclimated this other hunger. This pure, gentle, moan of a hunger. It is simple to say you believed in love; wished it upon others, witnessed it, longed a little for it. But it isn’t your function. Isn’t your toy to play with. You denied it.

There reached a strange night: your spine was against the black-wood headboard and sacrum further down, blooming with an old sensation, and your hands were on her. Groping, guiding. Admiring the naked skin of her hips, which twitched, and writhed with sounds and sights you prefer to have faith in no one else seeing. Not in a while, at least. These lines of midnight-light wavered over her movement, her teardrop breasts, even catching the mess in between her thighs she tried to hide rubbing in between the spreading of yours. Wet and wanting and abandoned and—you remember all too much.

She is beautiful down there.

Tears form in your heart.

Ellie was close to the edge. You could hear it in her voice. “Fuck—if you'd just stop playing hard to get, coulda’—uhn, had this way sooner.”

The phrase confounded you. “Hard to get?” Lots of her speech confounds you; there was a love-hate relationship to be had with that. On her side, though. You found it cute.

“Just—shut up, please.” She climbed a partial note, turning grunts into whines. As soon as she said that, her fists crumpled and her tension released. You, in your long life, have never seen such an overwhelmed girl. Her cheeks were smitten-red. Cum was trickling down the stretch of her shaking, muscled thighs, and she could not help it; she was lead with it. Ellie was wobbling once you were finished.

But she loved it.

Then, there it was in the derelict chapel. The strangeness again. Down her panties was your hand, training back the seam, and in the air her cries. Angelic ones. Pushing you into substantiation; you did love her.

And you felt selfish.

“You are too paced for yourself. Go slow, like this.”

You had pushed her own hand out prior. She was palming herself in a book-sprinkled office a short couple minutes after initial arrival. You aren’t even supposed to be here with her, in this house of God, scavenging for supplies—let alone outside. She should be paired with someone Joel trusts, someone Maria has seen kill. Human, good-hearted.

The quick, and snagging circles she performed with her fingers never compared to the attention and care you made with her. Like she was in a rush, and you had a blade to stab into the axis of the world. It did constitute sense: she was blushing with shame when you walked in on her—jeans almost off her hips—giving you the idea that she meant to finish in a dreamlike minute. But she didn’t slap her own hand for its perversion. She wore the helpless look.

“How long before you decided to tell me?”

“When we left.” The heart of her thighs compressed your hand. She was getting restless under your touch, twitching into your hand to earn more friction, biting down on her lip. Ellie can only do so much as huff when you rearrange the twining of her legs again. “It was aching s’fuckin’ bad, babe.”

You are certain that she lied. She had the velvetiness, drip and need of someone who hasn’t handled their problem since morning; it was pooling in her underwear. “Before a house of God?” you whispered, your voice a small softness in the mush of her mind. “You really are a strange one, my girl.” She couldn’t care less. You were tugging her just right and that was all she attended to. Numb-locked.

She mouthed a curse. Breath hitched in her throat. “Bite me,” she breathed out.

“Oh, you want it?”

Her face was pinching with pleasure. “Mhm.” Lips rolling over each other.

The once isolated and responsible Ellie you coerced for blood, was now tilting her chin up like a sunflower in bloom. Sometimes, she rolled her shirt up or pulled her pants down, letting you feed in clandestine places; her open thighs became a fast favorite, and dipping in between to that slickened parting made you want to write a poem with your teeth. An introduction to the core. For the thrill, for the devotion—it set the belting green in her eyes thin no matter the bite.

It made her feel loved.

But should it; being a strange thing to love?

Cracked moans curled out her neck. You noticed their swell, their added breath when your tongue caught her clit and wrote with it in circles, pulling her wound-ridden thigh over your shoulder. Lips, pinker than her vestal love, dropped open. You trained her voice to not be so swallowed, hidden, and conscious of being heard. You would not stop without hearing it. “Come on, Ellie,” you would coax. “Let me hear you.” And she would use it. Splutter it. Choke it.

“Fuck!”

“There, there..”

She is no virgin. She was no virgin. But, her mind made by the girls of Jackson she poured eyes—or poured lips—over, most in for casuals, or nighttime flings, neglected itself. She gave, and never seemed to receive. Ellie didn’t know if she was ever going to; then, there you were. Her heartbeat was running centuries ahead, and it gave you life.

You assumed, with an assuming inherence, to protect her from that loneliness. The loneliness you get from other people—not from the lack of them. You have her in that sort of catching grasp that feels suffocating, but ends up a pleasant surprise.

She thought you must be magic for that reason.

And the Devil for another.

“Jesus—are you listening to me?” Her voice wanted to break. It wanted to flood, it wanted to sting, it was a rough invocation that you never heard before, and her hands pranced the air. In anger. “You dragged a dead animal in here. You did exactly what I fucking told you not to!” Then, they crossed into her warmth, and the thrash song of her heart went muffled. “You fuckin’ kidding me?.”

Everything in the world went silent to listen in. The birds, the trees, the surrounding matter. But your guilt was just as quiet when, for a change, it should have been sobbing loud.

You caressed the words strolling from your mouth, a complacent gesture. “I was careful,” you tempted, tracing circles around that facetious hole in your face. “So careful.”

Her fingers turned to fists. “You..” Her mouth, in contrast, was a pert snag. But it soon had to face a laugh for coping. “You don’t get it, do you?.”

“I do.”

“Right.” She flinched into the light. Moved into the cold.

You get it when blood in droves leaves distasteful secrets, clinging to hardwood floors. You get it when others are involved and get dragged into it. What you do not get is the desire to see it happen. The stomachs that turn at you for not fitting into their forgivable frame. What should one expect?

Is she really this soft?

Oh, how your poor heart aches watching her not watching you.

Ellie continues at the mouth. Irritated fingers drag her under-eyes from their sockets. “Shoulda’ known this was a fucking mistake, Ellie.” Though your oral worship was stunted; you couldn’t see her whisper these things, you knew they were real. You knew she meant them.

You knew it would ring in her head.

That night, an attempt to instill a different idea ends in a laceration, and a throb in your nail beds. Because you thought she had done the one thing you would bleed her for:

Stopped loving you.

You rhymed her with reasons. You extorted your very own, amended morals for relief, with palms cupping her cheeks—and she cut a statement too deep: “Huh. Doesn’t fuckin’ seem like you’re any different than those bastards you ran with until—”

Her hair was the last thing you felt before the tear.

No, no, no. You are different.

Crouching, you clutched her chin with sharpened, hidden fingers, and a controlling thumb. You stole her tears from the wardrobe panel they wept to. “My darling,” you coaxed—as sickening as the dull blade. She twisted you inside herself; staring up at you through her soaking, shining lashes, made for internal conflict she could not put a finger on. “Does it hurt?” She is right, under the condition that you are gospel. What was she thinking?

She wiped her fingers in the openings of her blood, and examined them. A sniffle cut between looking at them, and looking toward you. “Y-Yeah.” It was a painfully awkward, and docile croak. Her irises were thin with shock, breathing laboured.

Ellie was bleeding from her cheek, to the tip of her philtrum, and to the edge of her apologies. Yet, you only cared how it..

Tasted.

“Shh, shh..” You swept her stained fingers from her face. “Let me take care of it,” whispers scattered. In her head, she was packed in litanies of heavy cotton; woolgathering. Paid the littlest bit of attention to your tongue, it lapping up her septum, furling back with blood, and how it should feel strange. But, it did not. She felt nothing. She felt the same. She still wore that lost, dreaming-eyed stare.

Why?

It is vile.

All is forgotten in time.

𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐄

“Ah, shit! Fuckin’ knife.”

Ellie hasn’t been her usual.

And neither have you.

You have been feeding less this cycle, and it’s put her into this stir. Divine, enigmatic stir. Questions upon worries upon interventions—headstrong hands and kitchen knives—curdle up in her gut. Are you bored of her? Has her nectar gone sour? Have you found another source? The silence in the room is louder than usual. Whether it was your intention, or its own result, Ellie has gotten used to this agriculture of give and pleasure; she inclines her wrist without your word. She opens her neck without your teeth.

The cabin, for once, is empty this day. So is her head.

You’re stood off to the side.

Ellie—who loves getting called stupid by her girl—pricked her finger for you. She was handling delicate produce on the counter, and her far more delicate fingers stood stockstill in their position, meeting the sharp tip of that knife in that headstrong hand. Her brows rucked, or already were; she had something on her mind. Some enchanting idea.

She sidles up against you. “Hey, babe.. mind cleanin’ this up?” Ellie wiggles her finger in an awkward and sultry manner, signature to she and she alone. There is a small, shining, seed of blood forming on the wound.

You consider it. For a second, or more, you consider feeding into her sweet little game. And she continues to pitch that finger east and west like a last chance, but it comes into question first. “Should you be handling that knife?” you answer—and she lets a disgruntled sound slip.

Also, you have seen your guaranteed share of slit fingers. That girl in the court had a graceless aptitude.

Ellie finds a smile to laugh at you with: insulted, asymmetrically dotted, with all the crinkles of someone who thinks so different of themselves—but it’s pretend. A softened wire in her brain molds into the warmth of your perception. She did it for Joel, once. “Guess not,” Ellie mumbles, bringing her finger down to stare at it. It almost bugged her that it wasn’t immediately in your mouth. The blood long-reaching.

Instead, you enamored yourself with the syrup-orange tea in front of you. Stirring, stirring.

Her throat clears. “What’s that?”

You turn, at last, with knuckles bending around the base of the porcelain cup seeping with heat. It feels cold in your hands. “For you.” You press it to the middle of her chest.

Her fingers come up to palm it, glancing at your face for a sign that another word would leave your throat. Eyeing up, and then down; she hopes you will make sense. You just hand it off to her. “Well, that answers my question halfway,” she sighs, cocking her hip against the counter. “Thanks.”

You lop a smile as nothing else seems to spring to mind. Turn away, turn away.

How should you begin—to a girl you met at the pulse of a throat—explaining that the contents in that cup can and will send her to sleep? Should you distress concern and mention how she has been missing it? Should the room go silent, and she as well?

A confession has been smothering your thirst for weeks.

You are bored.

Vampirical instincts have sat restless and upset in the sockets of your fangs. You feel tired, you get cravings that seem to climb and climb each hour, and at the crest of night, you prowl the short corridors in this house with suffocated footsteps, listening to the heartbeats of others with a small, specking guilt. You can quench it however you please, but the one thing that will not change is that you are a winter-blooded predator. You should be hunting; you are not. It nags at you. Months with her in your hands, in your mouth—and it isn’t enough. It was never going to be.

Last night went as usual. You rush to fill the bed before she finds it empty. Then, as you are shifting the sheets, her sleeping tosses and turns find you, and on your waist, her slender hand finds a spot made for her to fill. Her lips find something in her dream to grin about.

You brushed it under your thumb. “My sweet dove.”

Beside her, she assumes you sleep well. Then, in the morning, she mistakenly traces her mind for a memory recording her forgetfulness, tapping the unshut window, contemplating. The animal blood isn’t in her palms— you somnambulist.

Tomorrow, you would let instinct feel hunger again. Hunting is a desideratum. A deep-in, desired ultimatum.

Then, tomorrow came.

On the couch, you give in and draw her cut fingertip into your mouth. Sucking, silent and sensual. Ellie had the tea swirling around her limbs: weighing down her arms, slumping her legs, and her nose twitched with each escape from nodding off—and yet, she was still stubborn to lie down. Though you, twirling and twirling two fingers on her arm, inspired no help for her either. Perhaps, the swirling affect is a dreaming cling to you; your touch is a sleeping reverie.

Ellie jabs, with her free thumb, into her waterlines and digs around the stiffness. She can hardly lift them. Then, a low grunt follows. “Ugh, so tired.” She is the softest thing in this room. Nothing could compare, not you—not ever. “How did I get this tired?”

Your stained lips peel from her finger. “Abandon at night?” Clasping the tip as you talk. “You avoid sleeping.” Sucking blood from its tip feels more pretentious than it used to. Your tongue is climbing out, wasting time to be sure she watches you do it with your eyes shut in concentration, and she does.

Her eyelids droop imperceptibly watching you; a gait that out-performs centuries; your cold-fleshed lips wrapping around her warm finger, hands cupping hers, and suctioned as if it were your mortal first. The careless sanction is gone. The inaction to eating her whole—is gone. You deepen the length her finger reaches, and it hits near the back of your throat, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Licking each ridge of it, quietly cannibalistic.

Loving left and swept with you, greed.

“Babe..”

Ellie has moonshine eyes when you open yours. Green irises that no longer hold their color. Eyelids that are dog-eared, deepened and—brown-lashed, saddening. Not the eternal same. Spring is coming; why is there nothing?

After a silent pause, she answers. “I can’t sleep.” Rasp in her chords.

You dislodge her finger from your mouth once more. Sigh in the warmth fleeing you.

She ruffles her hair. “But it’s never this bad. Jesus, I just can’t fight this.”

The innocence, and lack of detection present in her springtime-longing attitude feels wrong—and is perfectly your fault. So, that conflict scars. You tighten your throat. Cause a hesitant strangle. Forever has passed; you believe you are tasting your own blood.

You flinch into partial shadows. Drop her arm. “Just—get some rest.”

Ellie frowns at your abrupt resistance. You can hear it when she tries to plead you backwards. “Hey,” her voice cracks in that special, air-pitched tune that stops your feet against hardwood: a tired Ellie, and the couch shifts with the sounds of her sitting up. “What are you doing? Don’t go.”

You imagine that arm is reaching out to you now.

“Cleaning up.” Stifled breath leaves you with a drop of your shoulders. “You will see me, first thing when you wake.”

She giggles. “Hm, okay.” So willing to trust.

For the first time, it sickens you. And for the last time, it make sense in your head full of heart what you can be. In her world—painted and threaded and canvas-white underneath—you can be her secret. But in yours, you are her open wound; latching condition. With no color but red. Everyplace, in every opening, red. She sees so much more than that. But she, afraid to blotch outside the lines, and you, bleeding throughout and into others, made for a conflicting pact. Messes, everywhere. And then, you understand it seems right that you feel sick.

She just assumed you were faithful to take care of them. “Love you, babe.” Even if you never pled for her faith, and her warm voice doesn’t stop you now.

You need to eat.

𝐌𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆

The mourning sun wept, for what you hoped, was the first and final time.

In your Georgian years, you were introduced with transubstantiation; you often tripped on your own flounces as a little girl, but carried into bridalhood with the pearl-blue poise a faith-wielding-mother-to-be should have. No longer did you intimidate crowds with ill etiquette, but rather, with what you became—and who you turned to in fawning innocence.

Wise men. Innovators, practitioners, maestros of trade. All of them had futures under their belt, and you had a single, untouched one. God, did men feed on that.

It was temporal. Men later found your intelligence to be intimidating, and in personal accords, offensive—for a woman. Your heart was a church on fire; knowledge crept in and you crawled out of your own mouth, spreading those words. Disgusting, secular truths. The court censured you for it. Kept you from attending banquets, beat you with threats of asylum, and rose torches to your beloved solace for it. It was a quiet hatred hailed, and yet performed so loud: your ears throbbed in pain each night.

But it never stopped you.

“Why do they cast you out here?” A voice—curious and delicate—whipped your intrigue out of your head, for a change. You peeked, with wide eyes, from under your brow and quivered over the silhouette leaning against the quaint terrace opening. It nudged off, and only then did its fern and fox-orange features become apparent, small pockets of light raining across. “With the dogs?”

Then, you knew it; it was her. Smiles creased in your throat. “And why do you wear pants?” But you showed just one, a subtle one. “And come to banquets smothered in coal?”

Albeit, she was clean; the wares of her straining day in the mines clung to noses. She pinched her coat open, and sniffed out either a truth, or a lie. The flinching of her nostrils proved one. “Ah—damn, guess I made a pitiful attempt at washing my own coat, huh?”

Her self-blaming quip pushed those smiles right up. Even, in your eyes. “Mhm,” you hummed, and it seemed to peel her lips back even more, off-centered teeth shining.

You tried to get her to simper, always. Seeing the slight gap in her teeth, all while inappreciable, pounded your unsettled heart.

Spring came in droves. It came with the bushels, it tore with the rain, and it ended with lips against your ear that promised you the period inbound was helpless. The summer was going to be helpless to your happiness.

“You don’t care for their thoughts,” she told you. “You grant yourself everything. It’s beautiful.”

Her white-hot breath burned through skin. Where did your sense of abandon go—you wonder? She was telling you to be free, but with lissome arms around you, you wanted a limit. You would rage without a hand to settle you where it wanted. And when you got too quiet, it moved; your invisibleness to being a lover menaced her to bits, but it was just that—invisible. There, buried. Low in the meadow.

Your arm leapt from rest. It wrapped with care. “No,” you whispered, a scared tremor in her hold. “Don’t go.”

Refusing her romances for little whiles, she never expected it—but expected you.

She laughed. “See?” Because you do get what you want.

You do lose your freedom.

Rain clung to blades of grass. Your phrase was foreseeable, but you had your ears folded and feet bare in the garden. The meadow before, beheld by two, and now yourself alone. At least, you assumed you were alone. If loneliness—and happiness, medlied together—felt as pasture and moisture did free under the pallets of your toes, the wet blades between, then it was fine. You would be fine with it, with this. The latchet heels you refused to wear, as a girl and then, hung from your fingertips.

But staring at that puncture of light high up made your concepts swell. Fine is not fine enough, if her being there made your days even finer. Love couldn’t abide longer; you tossed your heels in the vendure, lifted your drapings, searched for her through the atrium openings and contended with a stride that made it to the exits.

And out of them again.

Sharp fingers clutched you from behind, and it sent you a shrill. Your throat grated with it. “Let me go!” But as soon as the world rolled upside and around your throat, it collapsed being pounded into the ground tandem with insertion of pain. You constricted with prayers left inside.

Strange, pitched siphons of a dead kiss; a pair of coldnesses attached there—faceless as it lies too close—and drained the blood. You went silent. You were terrified feeling drips of blood escape your carotid and the mouth of the thing, ending up in that green grass. Pitiful, the tears. Vision gone wet and dull, this was it. In your mind, gentle for some end: this was it.

And then, you became again.

The creature replaced loss with a new fiber. While you were drifting into numbness at a glacial pace, no longer staring beyond your eyes, sudden flows of cold liquid were pushed and bursted. The pain waned, then it abated. Warping into a strange, something-else phenomenon. For a second, all the sound in the world emptied and nothing replaced it. Even in the hollows, where air is invited and dismissed, it was hauntingly quiet; you weren’t sure if you were breathing at all. Then, as a whip is lashed, it pops.

The first sound of this life, was a gasp. “Oh, god!” you choked from the air present inside you. It almost hurt to breathe, and your windpipes suffered a severe whiplash, strangling you to cough, cough, and cough until whatever pearl-shaped bane that was in there—was out. But as you clutch the flesh upon your chest, your heart drops. You are sitting up—free, without a thing to hold you in place.

Was it a dream?

For mornings you relapsed to the same conjecture; waking up felt no different than falling asleep. Cotton breathed, winter continued, and sunshine eclipsed in real life as it does in a dream. In the prologue of summer, you could never fall asleep. You were never tired enough. Wanted less of light and more of night, and you could not put a finger on it.

It became an ode to transient living—which you could sing no more.

But, something ached. From your throat, to the seedless pit of your stomach, something was wanting for you—wanting hard.

Conniption. That was all you needed. Tangled ligatures of conniption, a communion, and the weapons to do it. You went prepared: a knife was laced tight into your undergarment, accessible from the breach of your pressed breasts, but not once did you evince it. You did not need it.

You figured that out with your first victim. The blood—oh, it poured from the base of his voice into his shirt and it wrote your name in the stone tiling. In red, it whispered to you. Luring, convincing. You imagined claiming the possessions on his person, and returning your stolen virtue to its place in-heart was his result, but then you began to precede yourself.

Thoughts from another age trickled in. His skin, pulsing inside your teeth before you made the bite. It was meant to be.

Inside chapel doors, it was quiet and cold. To you, it was; the temperature perceived has a scattered origin. Summer heat coagulates against the windows, pulses inside the stone and almost boils the pool of blood under his head, but you are what you have changed into. Sucking, with hunger and without a stomach, it warms your lips before it chills and dissipates. Weird—love often operates as so.

Those doors groaned open. Behind your attention.

A relieved sigh starts. “God, I was searching all about for you,” that familiar voice said. Her knowledge was perfect, but on a peripheral edge; she had figured you were inside because your equine presence was outside, but she did not see you as soon as she entered. Blood left a curious trail. “What in.. God..” Into a forest of devotional pews.

God abandoned centuries ago.

“Joel!” Ellie reaches for him with a scream. “Get the fuck off him!”

With a mouthful of blood, her pale lips are focused on. You rise, teeth crimson, and she is standing there in the melting numb with nothing to protect her but flannel, wide-eyed with this waking world. Had the tea not kept her? “Ellie,” you rasp. The hole in your throat left with the fear of your failure—factured to her being here, and not on that couch. She hates. She hates your guts. She is staring at you, watching, and it is a shifted stare you hope upon none. Your throat goes swollen: understanding it.

You wanted to protect her.

Her fingers writhe in careful spasms. Lips fold in. “Joel?” She wants to be confused. But her guts sinks considering if she were to have slept, she would have missed this. Missed Joel, in confusion.

The swollen sounds that so much as struggle, and die in the windpipe. “I couldn’t do it, Ellie.” You draw the last breath you feen to kiss her with. You scrape toward that chance; step in a careful line.

Ellie regresses—she denies your approach. Her flinch is all too familiar. “You..” she trembles, and deprives you of beholding the one thing that fascinates you from reason: her unprecedented eyes, a green gift from the mother underneath. Tears dilate in the corners. Lumps in the throat toughen her swallows. “Couldn’t do it?” Her mind is hers, again. “You fucking killed him!”

Him?

When she wails, is when she trades you her look again. Brighter, sharper, raging and horrible. Space between your bodies diminishes as she closes it, but it is a meant punishment; to reach the man behind you. She comes near, and not near enough. “Joel..” Sobs will her mouth unhinged. “Joel, please..” Heaven cries.

Is he more special than you?

Both knees thud into the ground. She bare-hands the blooded snow, clenching it into a fist. Screaming, mouth wanting to curl into itself—louder, louder. “You killed him.. You killed him!” Ellie chants, and snow crumbles from her grip as she replaces it with the fabric over her blue heart, hysterical. Her own throat chokes her. “He’s fucking dead.. Look, he’s fucking d—d..” Icicles could form on her philtrum if it were a month earlier. Hunger admits; it could have been.

Really, you never learned who he was to her. Father, saviour, a nevermind-stranger. To you, or for you, everything about this home was a secret. The doors, not to touch. The floorboards, given to screeching. Other humans—she made sure your eyes kept her way. His firewood scent lit the halls at night, pulse calm; your judgement relied on the stories you felt throughout the house.

The smell of estrangement.

God, it reeked. Alcohol settled on his windowsill for nights along months. It seemed foreign. Not meant to be. Misplaced, you attempt to recall. You wipe at the blood that won’t go away.

Curious thing: you don’t recall his name being a craving.

Winter fills you again, and when you decide to sidle up against her in the snow waning to spring, she does nothing. For a moment, she is still curled—deadened—to his chest. That stubborn auburn strand has shifted from its tuck, adhering to the snot on her lip. You touch her to return her some life.

It works, to your disbelief.

She sniffles.

You breathe out, “Ellie?” close to her nape exposed, gentle enough not to shatter silence. “My girl?” But it gets fabric to shift under you. Attention to be given.

She turns slowly, and without a word. Stares without a drought in her waterlines. Your reflection consumes you in them, as both hands consume her at the sides, cupping her delicate, mourning-blue face. You could eat her. Sweet as an apple: round, shining, blooding whooshing to the surface. But you would begin with her lips. From her lips, to her love, as you did your girl before.

Yes, see? You are different.

You are different, and she loves you. “I love you.” You kiss her. Unrequited and soft. Though, the gesture snags curls into her lips. Yes, yes—please keep smiling.

Her lips part to utter something. Throat moves with the shape of a word. But, it does not dislodge. She swallows it, her lips snaring with it, pushing into this frown of undelight you could never have foreseen; doll-wide eyes and knife-point brows cutting into her own flesh. And then, puncture.

Your chest opens up.

It burns. It slides in. What is this sensation?

Out of that sudden choke-up, you drop your interests to the foreign parting. Seeing it, you stop living; silver protrudes from your chest, ribs holding it in place, and her hands are the guide. Fingers wrapped with love and promise, whitened from the pressure, around this blade and its hilt. No, not the blade you left for her; this one is a stranger, intrusion. The sacred invitation.

Its embrace is warm, not cold.

The dense snow is not when you plummet spine-first into it. It is warmest thing soothing your body ever since her last touch. You’re staring up at your freckled angel, high up—hopeless, but not confused. She has nothing more on her mind that you need to hear.

Revenge is her concept.

You cannot intimidate her to return. There is none. There is no return. This is not a punishment.

Your happiness is helpless; it is spring.

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