I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin
(and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
“Tsk,” his tongue presses against his teeth, clicking. “That’s a shame.” His voice is velvet now, honey as it pours from his mouth and finds the spaces between them, as he whispers secrets for only her. “You should look more often,” a breathy whisper as his mouth finds her temple, rests there. “They are fun.” He pulls back just slightly, finds her eyes and holds it, not bothering to hide the darkness that orbits there, the dip and rise of each constellation shadow as it clings to the strength and purpose of his gaze. “I am fun.”
She melts under his touch the way he expects, the way he craves, and pleasure blossoms like a garden in his chest. She was such a good lovely. His eyes darken with his satisfaction at the way breath billows out of her at his return, so much so that he does not lash out at her accusation, at the sharpness in it. “I am an artist,” he corrects her, his voice steel, unyielding to her. He was simply the truth, and he would not bend.
“Cruelty is but a tool,” he doesn’t know why he is educating her, why he is bothering to pull the veil back so that she could see the truth, but it is important that she sees—that she understands. “Art requires that there be sacrifice,” a rare passion runs beneath his words, rippling there like a stream, and it brings a light to his dark eyes. “A knife is cruel,” he can feel the tension, the live wire under his flesh, “until it is used to whittle, until it is used to carve.” He wants to reach out to her—wants to close the distance, but he waits, endlessly patient. “I am a knife, and I use the tools at my disposal to carve, to whittle, to create.”
He picks up the threads of the Fear again, almost absentmindedly, his eyes not leaving her despite the fact that his mind wanders elsewhere, despite the fact that he is humming low and deep under his breath, taking the landscape and morphing it. The trees grow wider, thicker, their bases coming to root against one another. Whatever nearby could-be companions melt away until there is only them, until it is just the two of them. He smiles his crocodile smile at her, wide and flat and handsome, glinting in the night.
Her question (Had?) rolls off of him easily and he immerses himself into her story, into the death that once clung to her; he imagines, for a moment, that he can smell it on her, a phantom trace of it that still wraps around her curves and sinks into forest depths of her eyes. But he doesn’t move, not until she finally closes that distance between them, until she collides into his side, and his mind billows outward with pleasure, forcefully pulling upon the violin chords of the Fear. He reaches for her, claims her, pulls her tight into his side. She has made her choice, he thinks, and that matters. She has made her decision.
Heavy-horned head dips as skillful mouth traces along her jaw, down her throat. Each brushing of his sooty lips branding her. “It doesn’t matter what happened to her,” he says, because it doesn’t. He has now relinquished his hold upon the green-eyed mare and replaced it with something far sweeter, something he curls around and pulls near to him, even as his mind continues to warp and change the landscape around them, molding it into the patterns of her nightmares. “What matters is what will happen to you, Exist.”
