Chapter 73
Davian
Paper Muse
Goodbye
Apparat, Soap&Skin
Quill wanted me dead. At least, her hands on my cheeks felt like blades wrapped in velvet.
Yet it wasn't her touch that would cut me. It never had been. It was her words that would bleed me dry.
And I feared it wouldn't be long now…
I couldn't imagine a more beautiful death than in her arms. Never before had I been so close to breaking in such an addictive way.
What she had just said… I wished I had never heard those words slip from her tongue.
Now they were burning themselves into the last remnants of my being. Those that had long belonged to her and would never again serve any other purpose than to breathe for her.
Images of ink on her bare skin flickered past my inner eye, yet I didn’t dare reach for them with my tingling fingers.
I must not.
Atrianima would gain the upper hand, falling so deeply into obsession that he would seize on this sip of freedom, even exploit it to shatter that last self-protective part of me. Unrestrained, addicted to chaos.
A slow, agonizing death.
Was that what she wanted for me?
Right now, I didn’t even know what I wanted myself, or if it mattered at all, because Atrianima knew exactly what he needed to take the deepest breath of his existence.
He wanted to end the war within me. Right here and now. Once and for all. And he wanted to win.
I could feel him lurking inside me, ready to break free and exploit my weakness for this woman to use his claws to crush everything I’d painstakingly built up over the years.
Quill took her hands off me, slid away from me before rising from the bed and stepping past me.
Dazed, I turned around, watching as she came to a stop in front of my desk chair before she… pulled her dark blue knit sweater over her head.
I wanted to say her name, to make her pull that damn piece of fabric back over her breathtaking body.
Instead, I stared at her, brought to my knees by a war that – as I was just beginning to realize – I had never been destined to win.
The bra she was wearing was made of simple dark blue lace, pressing her small breasts together.
She didn’t hesitate, watching me intently as she reached behind her back until the bra came loose from her chest and slid to the floor.
There was a rebellion in my stomach.
Warmth and a pleasant tugging sensation made the hardness in my pants grow.
Quill didn’t wait, undid the button on her pants, pulled down the zipper, then slightly moved her hips back and forth until the pants slid down her body.
She stood there, wearing nothing but her dark blue lace panties, and stared at me.
This isn’t right.
I should look away, but I was unable to even move my head.
She turned away from me, reached for the matchbox on the dresser, and began lighting the remaining candles in my bedroom.
My eyes slid down her body as if I were looking at a canvas.
The chest-length, sleek midnight-brown hair that slid softly across her shoulders with every turn, brushing her pale goosebumps, occasionally revealing fragments of her defined back, as if she were an angel of death without wings.
The curves of her firm butt. The way she glided ghostlike across the room before each new flame lit her face and split in her gray crystal eyes.
A goddamn work of art.
The problem? That parchment canvas was begging to be ruined by my ink.
My hands cramped more and more into the blanket.
Get up. Tell her this won’t happen. Leave.
As if rooted to the spot, I watched her walk out of the room.
Get up. Leave this house. Distance. Put some distance between yourself and her.
Quill returned, an inkwell in one hand, a black dip pen in the other.
Our eyes met, and a bomb of excitement, fascination, and fear exploded in my stomach.
I looked at her pleadingly, but she closed the door, stepped slowly toward me, around the bed, before pressing the dip pen with the silver nib into my hand.
She gently placed her hand on my cheek, letting it wander down to my chin before tenderly lifting it upward.
Trust me, Davian.
Waves of heat clashed inside me, and a longing throbbing traveled through my cock.
Every last part of me resisted the realization that I was hers. That she held me in the palm of her hand. Even when she let go of me, opened the inkwell in her hands, and brought it to the bedside table.
She sat down next to me, slid back onto the bed, looked at the bedding for a moment before carefully stretching out her lovely legs and sliding further back on the bed until, propping herself up on her elbows just before my pillow, she presented her plump tits to me with a burning gaze.
I should never have brought her into this bed…
Only now did I notice how my chest rose and fell heavily, as if my lungs knew that in a few minutes I would completely lose my ability to breathe.
My whole body was a traitor. She was one too. And so I was the only one left on the opposite side of a battlefield where all my allies were turning on me with drawn weapons.
Since when did they know I would lose?
It was nothing short of a miracle that they had let me fight in the dark until now. Probably to revel in my suffering.
Quill said nothing. She didn’t need to, for her mere gaze was enough to make mine wander over her body once more.
This woman did not belong in my bed. And yet here she was.
And me? I was too weak to keep fighting, collapsed, and finally let my weapons fall.
The next breath came like deliverance, finally allowing me to break free from that stupor, brace myself on the bed, and slowly approach her until I could lean over her – one knee between her legs, the other beside her hip.
I placed the fountain pen next to her on the pillow, into which she immediately sank, rested the tip of my thumb on her temple, and brushed the strand of hair from her face.
Quill's next breath made her body tremble, but that didn't stop her from maintaining eye contact.
She really wanted this.
And fuck, I didn't just want it. I needed it.
Anticipation glimmered in her eyes, keeping me from pressing my lips against hers.
I slid back carefully, making sure not to hurt her as I laid my body half on top of hers.
She was breathing faster, still shallowly.
All I could focus on for a moment were her hard nipples against my sternum.
I could barely suppress the demanding sound scratching in my throat. Aroused and driven by instinct.
I knew that if I gave in to the urge to kiss my way up her neck right now, this would quickly lead to more. And God forbid I let this moment end as quickly as it had ambushed me out of nowhere.
My dick pressed against one of her thighs. Thighs I wanted to knead, but I forced myself to relax, even though I would have loved to press myself even tighter against her, pull back, and do it all over again.
With great effort, I pushed the thought aside, slid off her, to her side, and looked at the inkwell with a growing sense of anxiety in my gut.
I couldn’t care less about this bedding if it meant I could do things to Quill I hadn’t even dreamed of. If I could imprint myself on her. With ink.
Don’t touch it.
When the voice inside me screamed the loudest, I gritted my teeth and reached for the dip pen, stretching out to dip it into the inkwell.
My hand trembled, didn’t trust me, and yet I wiped the tip on the rim of the tiny jar, watched my blood run back into the inkwell, until I lifted the dip pen and guided it toward Quill’s wrist, without touching her skin with the tip.
Mexico City Invitational 1966
Carlos Rafael Rivera
I looked at her searchingly. And she? She stared, captivated, from the dip pen to me and back again.
My paper muse. Ready to exist for me under my fingers.
God, as if she hadn’t already been breathtaking enough. This went beyond anything I’d ever fantasized about.
My hands were still trembling, so I tensed them up before guiding the dip pen, at the tip of which a drop had already formed, further toward her wrist.
The drop fell, and she audibly drew in a breath, watching with me as the deep black ink immediately made its way across her skin, down to the bedding. As if she were bleeding for me.
Yet it was me who was bleeding right now.
I would bleed out on her. Tonight.
Usually, minutes, hours would pass before I found the right words. But in that moment, it was as if the words had been waiting far too long to be liberated from their captivity.
The fear of hurting her as I placed the nib against her skin made me look up at her again, and she smiled encouragingly at me through rain-dropped eyes.
I stretched her soft skin with my fingers, carefully moved the metal nib across her skin, and wrote the first letter.
Again, I looked up at her.
She nodded, and I continued, watching as the ink ate into her skin, forming – if you looked very closely – the finest little veins wherever it penetrated the grooves of her skin.
A word. A sentence… And I kept looking up at her again and again, sensing her watching me as I covered her entire wrist, inch by inch, with lines that felt crystal clear, even if they wouldn’t make any sense tomorrow.
I didn’t want to waste a single thought on tomorrow. This here, right now, was all I had of her. And I wanted to use this fraction of our coexistence to bathe her in poetry.
A section of text formed, another right next to it under the crook of her arm, the next on her upper arm, and it wasn’t until I reached her shoulder that I noticed how violently her chest was rising and falling.
I paused, pulled myself out of the rising rush of adrenaline, and studied her.
She was perfect. Even with my blood on her body.
I would show her that she could push me to my limits, break me, ruin me, and still remain the most beautiful soul to ever set foot on this earth.
This world had wronged her. But as much as she hated it, as much as I hated it. She wouldn’t be this woman without all the suffering in her veins.