Insect In Amber

I see us in stark images that he won't let me articulate into words.

We are twins stretched in stars across the twilight sky, entwined, cold and alone, millennia of light years apart, and yet we burn with the fire of all those linked suns. Alone or together, we burn.

He comes to me and encases me in love that he thinks isn't love. Each kiss is another sticky strand burying me deep in its golden embrace. His eyes tell the truth when his mouth lies. He says he hates me and we mean nothing and it's just fucking, but his gaze worships. I can't bear it. It is too much.

It's easier if it isn't love.

His skin is silk and velvet and ermine, he is an exotic beast for my enjoyment, he is not of this world. He is a toy, a gift, a cunning bauble for a pasha's charm bracelet. He lies there, exposing his golden skin, eyes demure, my concubine, my impossible boy.

I think of him as mine. He tells me he belongs to no one.

My green-eyed lover is a monster. He kills with quick efficiency and careless zeal. Crimson is his favorite color. I've seen him bathe in it and I grew dizzy watching him. It was my blood. I bled for him, cut myself to the bone and it was sweet somehow. Like drowning.

He took me to the hospital. He told them it was an accident. I have a scar now, small and neat from the careful stitches. He likes to run his lips along it.

It isn't love, he tells me. He doesn't believe in love, he says. Over and over and over. Until we almost believe it.

There is a cut, in the shape of a heart, on my back, low down, where he thinks I'll never see it. I remember him tracing it with his tongue and I felt the shape carved into my soul. I saw it, a bloody, dripping heart, in the bathroom mirror while he slept in the other room.

I am trapped here, with him, by something that isn't love. I am an insect held fast in golden pitch, limbs quivering, as his not love flows over me and around me and through me and anchors me down. Beautiful, thick, and bitter, it chokes me.

He says it's not love.

He slinks towards me, danger and sex oozing from every pore. He is liquid ecstasy, fluid grace, flowing strength. Dream lover. Nightmare demon. Or maybe it's the other way around. His smile is a knife slashing flesh, his mouth the wound gaping wide. Red is my lover's mouth, red and terrible and ready to swallow me whole. His eyes, though, his eyes are those of a half-starved alley cat. Love me love me love, they say.

He bares his neck before me.

This isn't love, he says.