Skull Crusher

falls to the ground crying and screaming and moaning and gagging until I cough up blood so I start smacking my head against the concrete and throwing up

Crackling rose granules tint the edges of my vision, turning the entire image a hazy blush while shadows bruise magenta and boysenberry and highlight the blue hues that turn into the delicate lilacs and lavenders of struggle. Wine-tinted beads of sweat tricking from where strands of dark chocolate curls melt against his forehead, skin as pale as the vanilla frosting of a fluffy cake has tinted the bright candy apple red of coagulated, canned strawberries, or the slightly off-yellow and beige shade of trimmed fat to a bubbling, crispening steak sizzling in a pool of its own rich myoglobin, and as more saliva smears against his peeled lips, he’s never looked more delectable.

The red from his cheeks bleeding across his forehead and trickling down the striated tendons of his strained neck, his chin tilts upward, and he grinds the porcelain kernels of straight teeth together. Gnawing on his bottom lip with the edge of pointed canines while his shoulders and biceps strain downward—triceps stretched upward—the more pressure that’s applied to his wrists, the more his jaw tightens, nostrils flare, and mouth pulls back; his torso expanding as hardened puffs of hair escape him in the form of hoarse groans, the same way hot air would blow from a bull’s snout and cloud the salty dew of the morning air. This sight of him laid back against the leather pads, ropey forearms bulging as protruding, wide knuckles and long fingers wrap around rough, cold steel, his thick palms digging the grooves and causing hard callouses to peel open while his stomach caves and back arches, it’s pure animal. The way his muscles tense and quiver and his body struggles to bring the weight back up before his muscles, in their isolation, are driven by instinct and fear, trained strength giving way for the adrenaline as a result of the threat of injury if the weight falls past a certain point or if he can’t bring it back over.

I envision it, the slick musculature of his tongue slicing under a single bite, filling his tastebuds with the creamy copper of warm blood before his teeth scrape the front of the steel bar and either crack under the pressure or bend back, scooped from his puffy, bruised gums so they fall to the back of his throat and begin to choke him the same moment his jaw fractures and before he can even register what’s happened. A mouth full of blood soon gushing down his front and mixing with tears and saliva, the darkness in his eyes would clear to boyish desperation, and despite the knotting of my intestines around the nervousness of the ligaments in his round, broad sloping shoulders tearing, his elbows popping, or the exercise living up to its lethal name, the tugging knots and coiling tension yanking at my core alongside fluttering of my heart and dampness of my clenched palms are accompanied by a sweltering heat boiling up from my desire, causing me to feel as though I’ve been overwhelmed by a fever, agitated and shaky from sickness. And it was all worsened by the bone-splintering image of strings of blood hanging from his chin, thick sangria spilling from his lipstick-smeared mouth until mine latched on like a leech and I could swirl the tip of my tongue in the fresh holes in his gums like searching for the last globs of melted ice cream from the bottom of a cone.

The image provoked in its animosity a similar depravity in me: the craving and need to see him laid on his back, knees spread open, ankles wide, arms restrained over his head, tender and vulnerable, bare and slick with sweat and smeared in sticky blood mixed with semen, bitten and scratched and puffy and erect with the same shame that threatens to swallow me whole, only visible, soaking through him, crashing into him like waves. Devastated by it, engulfed by its brutality.

He’d tremor through it, sore and needy, wishing to be covered and touched, even if that meant being hurt because he’d realize pleasure constantly borders pain, and from pain, pleasure can always be found. And I’d strip him of it, of all comfort in his previous control, reduce his strength despite all those shimmering, great muscles, and all for the sake of pleasure. I’d teach him how to reach that point he was at now as his body scorched itself with a delicate line between injury and growth—creation and destruction, pumping himself full of the endorphins after the adrenaline and fear and had off that he’d set a new record—and how to find pleasure from that feeling. Not before, not before, but nestled in the warm embrace of pure suffering, not the pride of seeing the effects it had on me or in relation to others, but suffering for the way I was giving him the greatest pain of all. The sweetest, most succulent pain.

Love in the form of self-mutilation, in the name of addiction and violence, destruction, love in its most extreme form.

Nevertheless, my eyes averted downward to my plucked and chipped nails as a result of the apprehension and unease he planted in me as powerful and perverse as his lust, I swallowed the stiff lump in my tightened throat and refused to look up after he dropped the weight back to clatter against the padded floor and sat up on the bench. Catching his breath with sweeping inhales, as soon as he stood from the bench, in the same motion turning toward me, I saw from my peripheral the way he eyed me down, the curve of my shoulders forward and down, the drape of my neck and bow of my head, the soft quiver of my knees beneath the clawing of my fingers against the fabric of my leggings, just like a little lamb caught under the tightening noose of the rope who would have bitten the end of it and walked herself to the maw of the wolf, or the rabbit who in its fear would have curled against the heavy patter of the fox. His shoulders rolling back after re-racking the weight with another short exhale, his eye didn’t bother to leave his most natural, prettiest prey, who might as well have just witnessed him tear into another and come away still hungry (if not more so, having neglected his true craving yet gotten a taste for the plush meat, although thankfully not the case due to my having a tooth as well and lacking the stomach for jealousy), all with a deep flush of my cheeks that matched his to give away this sore truth. He made me feel hunted (and I loved it).