and the word was

He traced her savage bow-shaped lips with his hard thumb, letting the dull red paint smear on his skin as he listened to her deep, steady breaths shift into a drawn out moan, as her body released itself from a heavy slumber and found itself awake in the black-and-white photograph that was their room. Her round, swollen eyes looked up at him and gleamed like obsidian in the gray sunlight that soaked through the chiffon curtains.

His mouth gaped, ugly like a fish, and she held on to the breath he took as if to speak, but he didn’t say a word. All she wanted were his words, not looks—words that take up space and draw distances between deceitful bodies between filthy soiled sheets. She needed his meaningless, empty words to misconstrue, to forget, to bury the memory between the pauses. But he touched her, found pleasure in the femininity of her flesh, and reminded her. She shut her eyes tightly like a child erasing a nightmare, and began to think of her flesh, of the collops clinging to her bones. He wasn’t really touching her. He was touching slices of nothing. His cold hands against her cold skin felt like nothing. She smiled, and kissed his Adam’s apple before rolling over back to sleep.