Burn

She's a freak.

 

The sheets were barbed wire.

 

The flame on her skin was silk.

 

She removed her thumb from the switch of the lighter, studied the red mark on the inside of her wrist.

 

Something gorgeous on an ugly platter of scars and bruises.  The sight of her own blood intrigued her.  She watched the blood drip onto the plain white sheet that was draped across her naked body.  The red on white glared up at her like the sun off a yard of frozen snow.  It was almost blinding.  It made her vision go blurry.

 

The pain shouldn’t have felt like pleasure.  The pleasure shouldn’t have felt like pain.

 

“You’re a freak.”

 

She watched another drop of blood stain the white sheet before she turned her head to give him a blank stare.  The pupils of her grey eyes were dilated.

 

He was standing there, fully clothed, jacket hanging in the limp fingers of one hand.  His clothes were rumpled.  After sex clothes.

 

She pushed herself up on one elbow, stared at him.  She didn’t feel the pain in her arm, but she felt the pain in her chest.  It hurt to hear him say that.  It shouldn’t.

 

She was a trophy.  A tarnished, second rate trophy, but a trophy nonetheless.  She knew it.  He knew it.

 

So it shouldn’t have mattered.  But it did.

 

She laid back down, lifted her wrist to stare at the pretty red welt, inflamed and smeared with blood.  And that clear liquid that always follows the blood.  She was pretty sure it clotted the blood.  Not positive though.

 

Maybe if that clear liquid wasn’t there she could turn the barbed wire sheets red.  That would be interesting.

 

“I’m leaving.”

 

Who cares?  She turned her head to look at him again.  He had shrugged his jacket on again.  That cliche sports jacket with the leather sleeves and the school’s initials.  Because what would a one night stand be without one of those.  It was like a scene out of a story.

 

A very weird story.

 

 Maybe.  Who’s to say what’s weird?

 

Who was he to call her a freak?

 

“So?”  Her voice was scratchy, portraying the pain her body was denying.  She studied her arm again.

 

She heard him shift, the sound of clothes rumpled by sex.

 

She didn’t need fire to burn him.

 

“Whatever.”

 

He left.  She stared at the back of her bedroom door, bloody arm suspended in mid-air.  She turned those dilated eyes back on her arm, studied the burn from another angle.

 

She picked up the lighter again.

 

She needed the fire to burn herself.  She couldn’t waste it on him.

Author's Note

One of my favorite pieces. Written on a whim to silence the line "The sheets were barbed wire," which was continually running through my head.