Ebonized
He wrote his book into her; he burned his words on her skin, with his lips and his tongue and his fine alcohol. With every thrust, with every stroke came inspiration; he licked his dialogues into her mouth. She sighed back perfection into his ears, on his lips, against his neck, and scratched ink against his back. He bled his parentheses underneath her nails, her movements setting the rhythm and rhymes of his verse.
They started writing shortly after Rosslyn, with her open wound and missing necklace and his sudden need for space, or time, or sense, a room of his own where he could write to save his sanity: paper. They wrote on her bed and on his, sometimes on strange hotel beds, and it was always hot and always sweaty, always emotional and never questioned. Always blood, always alcohol.
He came to her with a bottle in his hand and she stood at the doorstep, not wanting to let him in but as they both knew would happen, let him in anyway. They kissed before, on the lips, on his wedding day and on that first inauguration ball, when she wore a red dress, got drunk and kissed him softly before falling asleep. It occurred to him sometimes, that she never kissed him while being sober. She was red that night, but then again everything was; except for Josh, who was white and bleeding black. He bled black when CJ bit his lip, a little bit too hard: his ink on her teeth, her lips forming the simple sorry he wrote on the back of her neck with too many words, every word but.
He was there after, he was always there afterwards, when she felt she was hollow and he felt she was everything, and she knew, she was blackened with his ink, was white with his white out, was wet with his saliva. What she felt wasn't emptiness, or loneliness; but it didn't feel like her, which was all that really mattered. She didn't want to die and turn into him and every day was a failing struggle to become what he idolized her to be: she wasn't everything and she wasn't his paper. She knew he put her on a pedestal because she was turning into him and he was an egomaniac, after all, and she was just a junkie of drowning in him.
They created together their child called perfection and killed it with the same amount of velocity, with his words on her body and her sighs in his ears, the dancing rays of sudden understanding and continued waves of hurt and confusion, and all that ink replaced their blood and poisoned their minds until they became insane with the intensity, the desire they couldn't take anymore. Perfection died under their own imperfections and blemishes, punctured with the same jagged ends that gave birth to it in the first place.
He created more children with a woman who had the clearest skin he'd ever seen; the skin he'll have to live with for the rest of his life, for the sake of the kids.
Sometimes, she wished she could throw his novel into the fire and watch it burn with a malicious grin, because no shower will rid her of the words that fall in her tears.