Page 170 of Ashen Torment

I close my eyes for just a second and lean slightly on my side, my cheek sinking into the pillow, my forehead brushing the cool fabric.

The window catches my gaze, the light is dense. It is about to change, I can feel it, yet it remains still. It hangs in the balance.

Like me.

And as always happens when the body surrenders to silence...

He arrives.

Lord Vasiliev Ashford de merde.

The name no longer scrapes as it once did.

It doesn’t sting or shake me anymore.

Now it pulses beneath the skin.

Why hasn’t he sought contact again?

Only that evening, that fleeting gesture. Then nothing more.

He let me go... or was it I who pushed him away?

I think back to my refusal. To the tips of my fingers pressed against his chest. To his mouth, seeking mine.

Lequel des deux a abandonné l’autre?

Probably it truly was just the lust of the moment for him.

The thought is born low, unhealthy, yet it makes its way like stagnant water sliding into a crack.

He draws pleasure from what is denied to him. From what he cannot tame.

And I am nothing but that.

An outlet.

A power game.

A prized body with a few damnations sewn into it.

A piece to be consumed and then forgotten.

But my body is no longer prized.

I clench my fingers against the fabric of the pillow.

An acidic pang pierces my chest, more intense than the pain in my knee.

23

Gouge Out

Evander

The ivory pawn slides across the wood with a soft thud. Richard does not divert his gaze from the flames within the hearth, his hands are joined before his chest, fingertips tapping barely against one another.

Every so often, he sighs slowly. Nathaniel flips through the copy of the book he brought me from Marseille on the sofa nearby: Les Fleurs du Mal. I hear him catch his breath over certain lines, his other hand gripping a glass of wine.