Butcher

I lie beneath him, my body cold and stiff. My legs are inert, arms thrown above my head. The ‘special’ underwear I purchased only a few weeks ago doesn’t feel so sexy and special now - they feel like cheap wrappings. Disposable, to be ripped and thrown away. Did he see through my façade from the start, or does he only notice what lies right under him?

He smiles at me, a lopsided grin that I once found charming, yet now there’s something in it that chills me to my core. A canine tooth pokes his bottom lip. He is shirtless, yet his nakedness does not make him seem exposed- muscles strain beneath his skin, taut and lean. My own is pale and soft under the dim lighting, something easily damaged.

“So pretty,” he says, laughing softly, a low, dirty sound. He reaches forwards and hooks a finger in my bra strap, pulling it further and further away before letting it go, the snap loud in the otherwise silent room.

I want to respond, but I don’t know what to say. It doesn’t feel real, or perhaps I feel like I am less than what I was. In this act, something is gone, like meat stripped from the bone.

His tongue laves my neck, but the disinterest in his eyes is clear. I imagine it leaving a sticky trail of saliva, like a slug’s. I had hoped for so much, yet here it is clear that I allowed my sapling dreams to bloom into delusion, and this is where it has brought me.

He unzips my skin and peeks inside to look at my guts. His hand plunges in, cracking my ribcage and pulling out my heart. He holds it in his rough, clumsy hands, feeling its pulse throbbing in his palm. It was his now, his to do with as he pleased.

He brings my heart up to his face, inhaling its scent, eyes fluttering shut almost lasciviously.

He takes a bite

and sets it aside

and spreads my legs.

This is the prize he craves. This is what he wants. He isn’t interested in my heart, not really, not like he pretended. He isn’t interested in my mind, aside from what he could make me believe.

He wants my body.

I lie beneath him as he slides himself on top of me, his body like a furnace. Blood is smeared over his mouth and chin. He breathes like a dragon, stinking breath fanning over my neck.

I am cold and lifeless. Like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. His hands lock around my wrists and pins them down.

And he devours me.