Cut Deeper

Anne with an E

Yet here I was at sixteen with my father’s best friend’s lip caught between my teeth. I hadn’t bitten him on instinct. I’d bitten him because I wanted to know what his blood tasted like.

Owen screamed and wrenched back. Something inside me snapped at the sound—not fear. Recognition.

I think I died the day my mother left. Walked out and left me with my father, left me to take her place in his hell, left me to absorb every blow she’d been clever enough to escape.

Whatever had been living inside me before that day had quietly packed up and followed her out the door.

What remained had grown into something else entirely. Something that bit.

He pulled back, but I didn’t release him. The skin of his lip stretched taut between us—an extraordinary, awful elasticity—and he punched me in the face.

Fuck him.

The joke was on him.

I’d grown accustomed to the beatdowns.

I clamped down harder until an agonising howl tore out of him, raw and animal. Another blow landed—this one straight to the gut, winding me completely—but I held on. I raised both hands to his face and pressed my thumbs down onto his eyes. He was over a foot taller than me. Double my weight, easy.

Was this power?

Not power. Pleasure. Something cleaner and more immediate than the razor cuts along my arms and thighs—those private lines I’d been etching into myself for two years, watching them open, watching them deepen. The longer I did it, the more precise I became. The deeper they went.

This was better.

I wrenched my head sideways until I felt the skin stretch and give way. I spat the portion of his lip onto the carpet. Owen stared down at it, one hand pressed to his ruined mouth, blood running freely down his chin and dripping onto his open shirt, his chest heaving.

Something made me stay. Maybe I had no self-preservation left to speak of. I heard his roar. I saw him coming. I didn’t even brace.

His full weight hit me and drove me down.

The back of my head bounced off the thin, worn carpet—a dull, nauseating crack—and the room tilted. Dizziness pulled at my eyelids. Somewhere above me I heard the belt buckle, the familiar sound of it, and I let the darkness come up to meet me like an old arrangement.

The pain had always been there. Mine or theirs—it made no difference. It was the only constant I’d ever known.

But now I knew I could give it back.

I just had to cut deeper.