Piercing
She bit her lower lip, felt the first sign of soreness. Smacked her cheeks for aggravation and emphasis. Gazed at her exposed, raw face in the mirror, freckles apparent, creases on display. Glanced at her hands, massaging the knuckles until they bled under the gooey pink bathroom soap. Wiped her nose and sniffled.
Outside she heard the motor running and forced the memory of movement with the mechanical twist of her hand on the doorknob. Just a bathroom, just a gas station. She shook out her hair and inhaled the cutting night. The blood clotted and froze on her fingers in small maroon trails. Like bad Henna, she thought immediately. Slipped on a pair of gloves and wiped the snow off of the passenger window while forcing herself to observe. Just a stolen car and swollen hips protruding from invitingly vibrant blue jeans. She vehemently hated observation as a rule, but it did the job; made things unbearable, just the way she liked them.
Inside, curled and indifferent, Veruca pursed her lips. She could feel only the tight little knots of sensitivity to the weather against her Liechtenstein-print shirt and idly thought how she ought to have thicker skin. Vacantly damned California. She had been periodically glancing at the waning moon when her view became obscured by Faith's ferociously calm face. She who let her teeth glint among semi-smirks and snow flurries in the horrendous music-video blue light of the service station just for emphasis. Veruca returned the wry look with recklessness that couldn't be misconstrued. She had come this far.
Their contrived disinterest in one another made Faith wet. She shifted gears in the custom-built European coupe whose cost could be projected only in salary increments; a hundred miles north of Sunnydale had passed by them in such friendly, concise minutes. Occasionally, she'd permit her line of vision to catch the pulsating teenager thrust at her side who reclined in brother-bought army boots elegantly scuffing the dashboard. The succinct stares they shared were her time-trusted hormone injections, and she would allow a cackle to slip along with her foot against the accelerator.
Their meeting had been simple, accidental, an equation not worth confusing with fate or chance. Two predators with the same hunger - to avenge their instincts against a world that restricted prowess to severely socially motivated purposes. The rest fell around their bodies situationally, eyes consistently boring into one another nudely, mouths that neither consented nor needed to, and movements refined only by the rapidity of ripping. The cemetery's wooded parts had buffered their encounters; stifled guilt, questions, growls. Dusk and aimlessness made them itch though; the decision for temporary movement had been natural, inconsequential.
Windows down and heat blasting, they speed into the obscenity of nowhere. With nails sharpened though slightly chipped, Veruca clawed the brunette's hair. Faith allowed herself to guess where the black polish had come from. Everyone has their little Zen sins, she surmised delectably. Forced the thought of a certain blonde pulverizing her in mind and body from the forefront to the backburner of her mind. Bruises and bite marks subsided, scars justified. Strong fingers yanked hard against her scalp causing goose bumps to silence her abstractions.
Fluke temperature fluctuations were the unexpected feature in their displacement. Music had started as advice, melted into another grinding motion along with the wheels and metal. Clouds played tag with stars. Faith interchanged tapping her fingers with digging them into the wheel as Veruca's tart, wet mouth began reacting against the coolness of her neck.
Her own mouth dry, Faith steadied herself with the formal smells of the girl's corporate cherry-blossom scent. Manufactured olfactory sensations were deterrents they used playfully, angering one another against what they longed to share - salt. She set her jaw and with a single swipe hurled Veruca back into her seat. The counteraction was equally timed; the wolf was on her again, more openly fierce. She tried to use the exit sign as a landmark, but her eyes rolled back, and clarity became impossible. Every movement was impacted by the division of rhythm and quivering.
Faith swerved, pushed, and jerked until she was able to simply react to the muscled creature that was positioning herself on the brunette's lap. Veruca's numb fingers flipped and twisted until her moon was again visible, until her Slayer had sunk comfortably down into the seat. Then, nostrils aware and flaring, she arched against the steering wheel and matched the rasping industrial vocalist streaming through the speakers with a pained moan. They zipped and peeled into speedy successions of tasks, mixing them haphazardly, tearing into one another for all the mistakes being made. Tasting flesh and blood as an act of defiance against responsibility and en lieu of freedom. It wasn't, after all, like they could stay. Like they could explain.
Veruca picked an unnoticed Exterra to practice driving from one useless small-town back to another. The night had not been customary, but in the straining whiteness of the sun-drenched morning she thought, It ought to be. She didn't urge herself to define their contact beyond that, wanted nothing more than the emotion she extracted from seeing glinting brown tendrils commingling with the crusting correlation of what every time of the month meant to their surface scars - reopening. She resented the melting snow and chuckled. Casually noticed, as Faith lay drowsily sprawled, the secondary crimson waterfalls coating the Slayer's fists.
"I want to slather terrible girly lotion all over you," she murmured reflexively.
"Fuck, only if I get to keep the silver bullet between your legs," the brunette snickered in reply.