Just a note – this story is EXTREMELY not safe for work. It involves drug use and graphic violence, along with being sexually suggestive.
It takes place in 1994 in the grunge scene of Seattle and features my character Leah.
There are 1,400 words after the cut.
There are too many people crowded into the basement for anyone to hold an actual conversation, but Leah doesn’t care. She’s on the perimeter, eyes closed, hands over her head as she sways in dance, grinding against whatever body is closest. Someone, maybe multiple someones – she doesn’t know, she’s been chasing the white dragon – is caressing her, clammy hands sliding up the hot, sweaty length of her torso. The music is dark and atmospheric; when she asked about it, she was told only ‘Bristol, baby‘. It’s a complete contrast to the growling guitars and grungy male voice of the concert most of them have just returned from.
“Hey, beautiful,” a voice says. She feels lips on her ear, fingers sliding over the swell of her cleavage. “Had my eyes on you all night.”
Leah doesn’t answer, nor does she open her eyes; she just smiles. It’s been awhile since the last time she attended a party quite like this, and even longer since she’s had a fling on a random couch with a random stranger. She turns her head slightly, letting those lips press to her cheek, where damp tendrils of hair cling to her flushed skin.
“Let’s get out of here. You want some air?” he asks.
She opens her eyes. Her suitor is gorgeous – dark eyes, full lips, chiseled features like Adonis himself. Her blood is racing, and it’s not just from the methamphetamine in her system – there’s something intense about this man, something she wants.
She wants to devour him. She wants to tear him to pieces in a frenzy of mindless passion. “Yeah,” she breathes, “let’s go.”
He picks her up and she obliges him, wrapping her limbs around that solid frame, letting her lips roam across his neck and taste that musty, salty cologne of beer and sweat. He pushes through the crowd and when the hot summer air blasts against their skin, it feels so cool in comparison to the stale air of the basement that Leah startles, turning her face up to look at the sky.
Each star sparkles brilliantly in her eyes, flaring with an unnatural rainbow of colours. They’re too near Seattle for most people to see so many stars, but she’s special; she knows this, even if she doesn’t really understand why.
What she does understand is the rough bark along her spine, the mossy ground beneath her bare feet, the insistent crush of his body against hers as he presses her to a tree. The parting of lips, the flutter of hands, the musical groans and gasps echoing in the air around them – these make sense.
She wants this Adonis.
One hand clenches his arm, digs in deeply. “Into the trees,” Leah whispers, and he moves with her, deeper into this little forested portion of suburbia. Her feet are as light as her head as she dances across the loam. “Perfect.” She dips to her knees, looking up at him when his fingers tangle in her hair.
He looks like a god, a halo of dappled moonlight crowning him, and he whispers, “You’re the finest thing at that party.”
She smiles, running her hands down his legs, feeling the athletic calves beneath his ragged, stone-washed jeans. Her fingers trace the tense lines of his Achilles’ tendons. “You think so?”
“Yeah.”
Leah inclines her head, resting her face on his thigh; his breath quickens in response. “So you’re glad to be here with me?”
His grip tightens. “Yeah.”
She closes her eyes. “I’ll unravel you,” she promises, “I’ll make you mine.” Her tongue feels like velvet, and the words like molasses rolling across them. “Would you like that?”
Adonis moans, his pelvis curling, the zipper of his jeans dragging across her lips. “Sugar, I’d let you unmake me a thousand times.” His voice sounds as thick as hers.
“I just need one,” Leah answers. Her eyes flare wide, drinking in his dark gaze, but in her mind she’s focusing on the muscles beneath her fingers, the simple, slender tendons that let him stand. She imagines him as a sculpture, her fingers as chisels, and with one sharp strike, she carves into him.
He doesn’t even realize he’s crumbling until he’s already on the ground. There are clumps of her hair in his palms from the violence of the fall, a blonde so pale it glows in the low light. He sees them and begins to laugh, high and giddy and completely unaware of the damage she’s wrought upon his body.
Leah knows, though, and she’s hungry, she wants more; she has his unwitting permission to unmake this perfect body. Still on her knees, she straddles him in case he tries to stand and realizes he can’t. She’s not ready for a struggle, and he’s stronger than her – for now.
As if admiring him, she presses her hands to his shoulders, slipping them under the unbuttoned flannel shirt he wears over a sweat-stained white tee, and rubs his biceps. Adonis is still giggling; he is a piece of art beneath her and she the artist, reshaping his flesh with her hands, smearing away the excess and casting it into the ether.
It’s only when she has smoothed away the muscle all the way down to the bone that he realizes something is wrong, and that moment of realization is what she’s been waiting for; it is as delicious as anything she’s done yet to hear the sharp exhalation of fear when he tries to move his impossibly weak arms, to taste the acidic panic cutting through the honey of his voice as he gasps, “What the fuck is wrong with me?” He doesn’t know it’s her.
Who would? She is slender and blonde and weak, astonishingly pretty beneath the too-long, oily hair and loose layers of earth-toned clothing. She looks more like a starlet who descended into the “scene” to better learn a role than someone who truly lives it, despite the fact that this is her life.
His eyes show little more than their whites when they roll wildly to meet her gaze. She just smiles, withdrawing one pristine hand to stroke the back of her fingers across his throat. “You said I could unmake you.”
“I think I need an amb–”
The words break off abruptly into a garbled scream as she crushes his arm in her fingers, crumbling the bone in her hand – not with physical strength, but simply the strength of knowledge and magic paired together. She knows what powdered bone looks like. She knows what a humerus looks like, and all she needs to do is merge the one into the other.
She also knows what a trachea looks like. Her eyes flutter closed so she can better envision it – his gaping mouth, his frantic eyes, they’re too lovely, too distracting – and then those fingers sink into his neck as she simply erases a chunk of his throat, leaving it as perfectly exposed as if someone had taken a scalpel to a cadaver. There’s no blood, no flaps of skin, nothing to indicate that she has just sentenced a man to his death here on the forest floor, twenty yards away from fifty drugged party-goers.
But for now he’s alive, silent, watching her; she rides his thrashing legs, messily and awkwardly, nearly losing her balance as he fights to live. He doesn’t know he’s done for. He’s too high to hear the whistling of breath across the unnatural gap in his neck. “It’s not personal,” she assures him, steadying herself with palms pressed to his chest, “I think you’re hella fine, too.” The smile that flickers across her lips feels awkward, but only because she’s fighting to keep it restrained; in truth, euphoria fills her as she unmakes the organs within his chest, seeing them dissolve in her mind, no longer taking care to avoid his nerve endings as she did with his ankle. It doesn’t matter if he’s in pain. He’s dying.
She could remake him, if she wanted to. If she weren’t so iced. Right now, there’s no way she can shape those organs to their true form once more.
She feels death come for him and leans down, her mouth hovering barely above his to whisper: “Goodnight, Adonis.” His body seizes up before simply giving out, and even in this state, severed and broken and liquified, one little death rattle dances across his palate and through his lips.
Leah inhales his last breath, and smiles.
