She’s so delicious – her lips, full and bruising against his, are sugary sweet with a tang of metal, like the blood he knows she’s spilled. Her eyelashes are fluttering against her rose-blushed cheeks, so falsely innocent – so he bites her bottom lip and takes with his tongue the words she won’t say – that she is his, or that she loves him, or anything at all that a lover would say. And as he presses her willowy frame impossibly closer, he realizes something he’s known but never acknowledged.

So they tumble into bed, a mess of tangling sheets and wandering hands, and he tries to ignore what he knows he cannot. It’s in the way she looks through him, the way she bites her lip and tries not to see him, the way she never says his name. She looks at him and tries to see someone else, but he doesn’t care – he wants her.

Nicking her neck with his teeth, he draws blood, but pays it no mind as it paints a candy cane stripe down to her collarbone. It suits her to have her snow-white skin sullied, he thinks. Because inside that skin, she’s wanton, cancerous, dirty. But then again, so is he.