The First Bite
a rusty, decomposing slew of themes + motifs (it's 2:00am and I can't even comprehend what I've written)
How do you indulge without destruction? How do you love without consumption? How do you crave, yearn, lust, or desire without it being violent? My love for you remains a means to an end, a self-destructive and mutilating devotion that’s so sweet it rots. As demanding as a crime scene for a body, as a stomach is to be fed, teeth to tear and chew, I have to eat you. I need you to eat me. I want the taste of me to be the only thing that can truly satiate you. I want you as addicted to me as I am to you; I want our devotion to break the barrier of life and death, and in my rottenness, decay, my sickness, and depravity, I want you to choose to love and devour me, anyway.
Metal plates slap together with a harsh, high-pitched slack, wire cords wobbling and going lax until calloused, sweaty palms grip steel again, and the cords snap tight. Muscle tenses, lengthening and shortening with reps that slow as the skin flushes and teeth grind down until the jaw pops. There are a few people hovering around the machines, waiting for their turn as more people occupy the space compared to an hour, or even two before, groups huddled together of girls and boys alike, taking turns with the equipment until moving on while others simply hang around and talk. And cutting through this crowd, a silver string refuses to allow too much space between two people in particular. The back of my neck had prickled with the hair standing on end as soon as he walked in, my head turning to my shoulder just as he reached my path and our eyes met, the knot in my chest and hollow ache in my stomach unrelenting for the next two hours as from one set to the next, our eyes both refuse to and can’t stop meeting, all the way up until I begin making my way to the lockers, and see him come from the opposite end of the walkway.
Once the combination slips free the lock to the cabinet, I open it and reach in to grab my bag, slowly placing my headphones alongside my water bottle next to each other in place of my keys. Purposefully taking my time until he’s right next to me, and out of my peripheral, I can see him glance down. My heart still hasn’t calmed, the lump in my throat successfully closing it, making it difficult to swallow, causing the roof of my mouth to go dry. The butterflies in my gut have turned to wasps, angry and stinging me, prickling me with a burning sense of urgency to take a knife to the tension and try to relieve some of it, try to bite through some of it. But it has me tangled in it, limbs twisted around each other and bending back, bones snapping, skin pulling free of slimy sinew and muscle. It has me standing there suffocating it in like a black wire wrapped so tight around my throat that it silences the scream threatening to well up until I’m finally allowed a breath of air from him stepping around me. I look up from my feet, not even realizing I’d lowered my sight to the linoleum floor as if in the presence of something greater than me, and the panic splashes over me, washing away the heavy, sticky tar of whenever he’s so close if I breathed too deeply I’d catch his scent. And I move; hurriedly sweeping the straps of my bag over my shoulder and clutching my keys, I follow him toward the doors. Not too close, he’d have to hold them open for me—he’s already outside by the time I get there—but close enough I can still see him.
I’m drinking in every second of looking at him, gulping down each detail and mulling it over my teeth the quell the throbbing of my gums as best I can, lost in in until I realize I haven’t located my car to walk toward, instead stopping at the edge of the parking lot just as he reached his car, expecting one final glance to me before he got in. I move my eyes to where my car is, just a few spots from his and across the lane. Yet, when I look back at him with a mere shift of my gaze, and realize he hasn’t gotten in the driver’s seat but was holding the door open, looking down, that his hand is balled into a fist, chest rising and falling slowly as his eyes squeezed shut and he pressed his lips together, letting the air from his flaring nostrils until his Adam’s apple shot up, and as it fell, he turned his head back to me, somehow I knew. I knew without him doing anything else other than staring at me, which wasn’t anything new, that he was waiting for me. Nevertheless, as soon as I began walking again, this time distinctly toward his vehicle, not mine, he turned back toward the open seat and pulled himself onto it, closing the door and, a second later, twisting the key into the ignition so the brake lights blinked on.
Their red gaze replacing his chocolate one, I halted dizzily, my stomach dropping as if suddenly filled with stones, and struggled to find my next breath. How could I be so stupid? I almost shake my head and redirect myself over to my car when a splash of bile to the back of my throat, stinging me with its oily consistency, I somehow take another step, but not in the direction my body is screaming at me to go in. The passenger side is unlocked once I reach it. My fingers slip around the handle, and the door is heavy. I instantly memorize the feeling of the car under my hand, as if some sort of extension of him.
It falls toward me as soon as I unlatch it, keeping it in my hand and refusing to look toward him, despite him watching me as I hoist myself beside him. I nearly close my eyes just to keep from having to look at him so close, though his smell is now invading my senses. I can feel it seeping inside me, my pores, soaking into my lungs, and for the first time, my fingers shaking as I pinch the fabric of my leggings, I don’t trust myself near him. I don’t know what will happen, but my cheeks are hot and puffy with how much I’m blushing, and I can’t help but smile. I’m biting my lip so hard that I begin to taste a mix of copper and salt. The engine purrs beneath the seat, and I look up only when the tires begin pulling at the asphalt, the car jolting once more when he puts it into drive, and with two lefts and a right, we exit the parking lot. There’s a panic in me, an unease setting in the pit of my stomach, however, as though I’d just been kidnapped, my fingers pinching the fabric of my leggings, itching to reach for the door. I keep them as still as possible before flattening my sweaty palms to my thighs and looking at him.
This close, I can see the hair on his arms, the tops of his forearms, and peppering the tops of his wide knuckles. The same color hair dusts in front of his round ears, and I’m realizing how much more wolfish he actually is than I could have imagined. Those features had previously only existed in my mind, in the pure fantasy of what textures his body would hold, yet now, seeing the blemishes, freckles, spots, hairs, a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his neck from his hairline, how his skin pulls and folds with his movements—the flex of his hand around the steering wheel leading to the deepening striations of his forearm and whitening of his knuckles—the stray hairs of his black brows, how oily the taut curls of his hair actually is, dampened both by sweat and held in place by sticky product, how his tongue moves under his cheek and lips over his teeth, his nostrils flare with my scent, I’ve never been more disgusted. Not only by him but by myself. In the reality of his presence, I suddenly became terrified of it, of the softness to the musculature I’d find if I put my hand on him, the pulse of blood beneath, how I could trace his bone and look into his eyes and feel his breath and in the reflection of his pupil’s, see my own hunger not only being perceived but at the same time, staring back at me. I became afraid of him, of his force, his nature, all he’s capable of—knowing how much bigger he was than me—and feeling both a rush of excitement and terror because of that. I became aware of all the things that were similar to myself in him and that we were entirely separate. That I couldn’t control him. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t even stop myself from wanting him so badly it made me curl up between his teeth and hope he’d bite down like a lamb fitting itself between the canines of the wolf and nestling onto his tongue, wanting to be torn apart, chewed up and made use of, tasted, consumed, savored. Loved.
And with that, I start to feel him, at long last, bite down. Begin to love me. Yet not until I manage to hush, “do you want to go get food?” Simultaneously wanting to know where we were going, and also wanting to cut through the silence with at least some conversation, even small talk.
To which he responds with, after another lurch of his sharp, protruding Adam’s apple makes me dizzy with the sharpness of both his tone and juxtaposing features, “you know I’m not hungry for burgers.”
At that moment, I couldn’t decipher what it meant to hunger without it meaning love, and the act of devotion in hungering, in starving for something enough to be satiated by it. Even as morbid as necrophilia. Even as destructive as cannibalism. Whatever violence we would cause each other, whatever destructiveness and harm, in the end, it would only further prove our desire; the impatience and greed that came along with it, and the fear and anxiety toward the lack of control we had over each other. As much as we wanted to indulge in each other, it would be as selfish and overwhelming as a fever demands to be felt, demands to be suffered. An infection that would spread and worsen until the sickness took root and would demand to be no longer ignored. If that didn’t consume us, we would destroy and consume each other before the fever was properly expelled. I couldn’t even say whether my hunger was even my own anymore or a reflection of his, or whether his was his own, whose had come first. Whether they were the same or had ever been different. Our hunger and desire were so tangled together and deformed that I could see it, between us, a growth that kept us connected.
Perhaps to even end this, we would have to chew through that first. I imagined it would spray puss and green, blue gunk, pulsing and throbbing with the very sickness that keeps us pressed together, orbiting one another, addicted to each other. I then pictured the big bad wolf, laying curled around a dead, white lamb plucking the maggots and worms from its green-tinted fur, a fatty cord between them such as an umbilical cord keeping the lamb from ever truly decomposing, from ever being able to ever really escape the wolf’s devotion.
His nose drags down my front, each inhale bringing him closer and closer to his meal: his hot breath melting against my skin so goose bumps trail closely behind, marking his path, and the hair on my arms and legs stand on end, which I stiffen upward, crooked in the air as a dead bug would lay on its back. Arched spine and hips spread, middle being split open as it bloats and dissolves under the summer sun; however, the heat, in this case, doesn’t come from the sun, but spreads from my thighs upward my core and extracts itself slick and drooling with strings of mucus clinging to the silken, pink and mulberry blushed skin. This heat penetrates my softness, beats my sickness into frothed sugar, and makes it ooze out like cream-colored maggots, clumping and spilling and sticking to his groin as if this was his shovel, and he was extracting a grave in search for decomposition, my body made of dirt and wood, crumbling around steel. His desire was necrophiliac as mine was all-consuming and carnivorous, I sunk my teeth in him, and now he gets to bury his knife in me. Open me up after taking me to the grave to make a bed out of the dirt while the sheets harden, still soaked with my blood.
Before that, nonetheless, I couldn’t seem to reach enough of him at one time. That was always the problem: never enough of him, yet simultaneously too much. This greed made me desperate, panicky. Over the broadness of his shoulders, arms scooped beneath my thighs as his large, wide palms and long fingers move from massaging my breasts to pressing down on my stomach and feeling the muscles tense in response to his teeth and tongue, to his appetite, I can see his tapered hips roll against the mattress as a subsequent deep shudder takes hold of him. I whimper against the desire to feel the strength of his waist against my own, the weight of his body digging into me, burying me deeper in the dirt, but my fingers only move from the sheets back to the taut, half-undone, waxy hold of his brunette curls, then to the sides of his head.
My own head thrown back, I try to push his face away from devouring me further, such heat and wetness expelling from me that I thought if I did, his cheeks and mouth would come away dripping in vibrant cherry red. My body seizes with another abrupt yank of pleasure in my gut as if my own stomach was about to wrap itself around his tongue and clamp between his teeth from my cunt, and with a growl that vibrates against my numbed folds, causing tears to blur my vision, he takes both my hands in only one of his, planting them to my chest by the wrist and keeping them there until he had had his fill. When he’d remove his fingers, first the skin beneath would be white, then a pale yellow, then would bloom with lavenders and rosy bruises in the shape of his pads. Crescent moons would remain from where he dug his nails into my softness. Indenting me, mangling me under him, such as two cars colliding and molding into one another.
Blood rushes through my body without warning, explodes in it with a harsh pop as I feel my walls twisting around his tongue, giving him this death so he may take it and mull it over like expensive wine and chew through it like rare, knotted meat so the fat dribbles down his throat and the lid of the coffin slams and screws shut, only for him to take steel to the splintering, cracked wood and drill his way back to my rotten corpse, properly fermented and marinated in sweet desire, melting around him in tiny tremors and hiccups of small breaths. Curling over myself with the force of this End, it slices through me as sharp as a knife through my abdomen, causing my fingers to claw at—twisting around to grab—his hands, which he allows them to hold while I gnash and grind my teeth, quirking my sweaty brow before falling back with an equally as abrupt thump alongside bounce of the springs under his mattress. Gulping oxygen back into my lungs, the euphoria of death washes over me, the haze of unconsciousness threatening to envelop me in its embrace, but he’s not done with me yet. He pulls me from the depths of my post-mortem haze as quickly as I plunge into it.
Everyone knew murder, even the most impulsive acts of violence, never ended without such indulgences; violence was nothing without pleasure. His dark, wide eyes re-emerging from the puff of my mons as wet and glistening as his shiny mouth and chin, his tongue swiping the leftover sweetness with loud pants, at the same time, he lets go of my hands to plant his next to my sides and climb back over me. The word wolf flashes back through my mind, ringing in my ears, feeling like fresh kill beneath its predator, missing the tender ache of his teeth in me, quivering under the soreness of being left open, a glaring wound that still weeps and would make my thighs stick together if he’d allow me to close them, something I try to do with the squirming of my hips before he lodges his hips between them; forcing them back open with his thighs, which are each nearly the width of both of mine together. I can’t stop him. I can’t stop him. Then the realization hits me: I don’t want to.
For the first time, I don’t pull away from the closing of his jaw, from the knowledge that everything that’s happening is him consuming me further, gulping me down. His breath seeps down my throat, and I instinctively lengthen it for him, my eyes fluttering closed as another pang in my core pushes me toward him. I then wonder if corpses ever react to the heat of their lovers by pushing closer to them, the life in their bodies radiating into the cold, green and blue tinted, stiff skin that’s only known the wet touch of bugs slithering and squirming and skittering across it. I’d never been touched in this way before, I had no other way to describe it. I could only picture myself a corpse under him, him having total control over me, and me being filled with filth, permeating with rot and sickness, which he allows me to taste for the first time when he pushes his mouth onto mine.
I taste of blood and frosting, a gruesome dessert with a twinge of acidity, metal coated in meat, softened with violence. It would only be a little later that I’d find he tastes the same, that this grave was not my own, to begin with, and as we lay there, sticking together, melting into each other, I felt the connection between us thicken, swollen veins feeding the sickness with an appetite that takes from both. My stomach is full with him as his is with me, and I close my eyes, disappearing back between his teeth, closing the coffin and nestling against the hilt of the knife which remains buried inside me; even after all that bloodshed, I await its renewed appetite. I await the next knock of the shovel, beckoning me back to the land of the living, even if for only a few brief, intoxicating breaths. I await him to want me and for the next opportunity to give myself to him. Like a wound waiting for its knife to fill it again, having one use, one purpose. A cake waiting to be eaten.