Chapter One| The first time this black, vicious woman appeared into my vision, I was staring into the great blackness that had come to inexplicably resemble my life. The sky was pouring down as though some tragedy had finally stirred the clouds into a fit of sentimentality, and in result, I was a soaking thing left on the park bench. My long dark hair which I had often held as my crowning glory, now hung as course thread against my skull, surely white and pale in the darkness. It was the hair of a rag doll, and I thought it was truly fitting because it must surely be only stitching and stuffing that filled me. Bones could not be this soft and malleable. They were to be hard. And angry sometimes, with jutting bones to break flesh and be as the natural defense mechanisms against the scavengers of life. But I was just merely clothe. An item so easily constructed and damaged.
As smooth and languid as oil, she moved through the rain and turned her dark possessive eyes to me. I saw them gleaming even in the dark, the rain. She was the type of creature to which you easily became prey, no matter what animal you laid claim to. Her jaws could easily unhinge and devour you whole without a passing thought. This woman was everything I had ever hoped to be, a long-legged, arrant wolf. Only words could describe her as such.
“Hello little ghost, I've been looking for you,” she purred easily, narrowing her eyes with pleased arrogance.
I could have fixed my mouth to tell her something. I could told her to fuck off or go to hell; I could tell her she was absolutely the most gorgeous creature that had been in existence or the most savage. But instead I fixed beady little eyes to her and let my mouth resume itself shriveled state, glaring at her for all intents. She was beautiful with wild black hair and almost golden colored eyes, but that face was drawn—long and intelligent; she was the monster of nightmares, with the sharpest teeth and the ugliest truths.
“You look like a little drowned kitten. What are you looking for?”
“Death,” I hissed at her I'm sure. I could feel the breathe fleeing from between my teeth and the cold rain pelting painfully against them. I could almost feel them shattering in my mouth, she laughed suddenly and pulled me roughly by my arm. Perhaps natural instinct made me like hateful, and we went crashing to the ground, rolling in water and mud. I could feel it slap against the corner of my mouth, filling it with its thickness. I spit into her face, pulled her hair, and immortalized her face into the mud, watching it cake beneath her eyes and in her stringy hair. I kept slamming her face until I saw red, mixing effortlessly with the mud. Then I stood above her, seeing her face down.
I hated the fact that she was so easily a wolf but looked as tamed as a dog.
“I'm looking for the swinging pendulum of death,” I say after so long, when she frees her face from the mud and I watch it starting to dry around her head. The rain has long stopped and she stares at the sky unmoving. She barely breaths and when I prod her with my foot, her flesh is soft yet unyielding. She looks dead, she sounds dead. She's dead to me, and finally intelligences returns to her eyes.
“There's no shame of that,” she murmurs as though it is an uneventful thing and stands; her rising is an epic moment, the equivalent of a goddess rising from her throne of slumber and shaking her godly hips to the winds. She yawns delicately and she looks at me while she picks mud from the strands of her hair.
She has this look of questioning, as though forcing something from her lips. It is one where such a thing would speak on secrets that will not be shared between strangers. And I think I will never forget this black wolf as it watched me in the rain. So she follows the lines of my arms and how it cuts into my shoulders and sinks to my chest.
I hate her. There is a such thing as to hate without loving.
Her hair is a wild mess again, framing her face. She appears thoughtful and nowhere like the woman I fought with for no apparent reason. I had felt the need to make her bleed and I did. Catching my look, she reads my mind, and smiles with that unjust manner.
'You're very rude,” I remark lightly. It is no way to injure her—I have no way. She is invincible once more even though her blood is on the grass, and under her nose, streaking like war paint. Even beaten she was a fucking kamikaze warrior with mud smeared across her severe cheekbones.
But she grins her grin and laughs. It is like razors to a vein. “Call me Jet.” She said lightly. “And I'll take you higher than you ever been.”
The words she meant to say was she would make me crash harder than I had ever before.
We went to her apartment as though nothing happened. The small allotted foyer was covered in our dark waste, her blood caked in with mud. I watched as she stripped herself completely of clothes in a quick, languid grace, before rummaging in her drawer, pulling out two fags, and lighting them up, staring out the window. It was still streaked with wetness and light pierced it in the slightest, casting her pale body in a slant of gray, just cut so across her breasts and smooth, flat stomach. And then across her pale thighs there was just darkness as if it were dressing her. I wondered how beautiful someone had to be standing naked and dressed by light and shadows.
Then she turned those gold eyes to me and blood was dried just under her thin nostril, and the red eyes of the cigarettes stared at me smugly before she handed me one, smoke streaming through her slightly parted lips. I wasn't a smoker, but I didn't exactly deny it and took her offering; the sweet mistress nicotine stuck her gorgeously pale neck into my system, and stretched herself through my veins. As we stared intently at each other, drawing smokes into our hollows chests, and blowing it in each others face, I thought then I was the wolf and she was the cat, but she stared at me as though it were opposite. Our gazes were hard things trying to peer past the oily darkness and residue that was in us, before it became entirely too much to see the reflection of something broken.
She shuffled away like sin and I watched her pale buttocks shifting in accordance to the shadows. These are wrong things to think, of a woman as a wolf and as a beautifully divine creature. But still I thought them. And when she returned carrying a single object, a long black shawl to clothe her. She then stripped me of my clothing and swept my dirty hair from my face and stared at it. A long drawn moment in which our breaths were shared and her lips were few inches above mine before she lead into the bathroom.
The tub was full and beautiful and I was alone as I rested against the base, completely submerging myself. All I saw was darkness and it was nice to be surrounded by all the dark and the light. But of course none of these things last forever, for when I emerged all her paleness was lit ethereally. She gazed at me as though I was a siren coming from the depths of the ocean to take her as mine.
A spell began amid the smell of the soap before she moved and gently took my wet hair and worked her hands through it. Her blunt nails were sharp and rapping at my skull but it was a sign of weakness to admit her cruelty. It was one where limits were tested; she was appeased and sat to simply wash my hair, spoon water into the pitcher and let it rinse my trenches. Then, she came to sit next to me, those ruby wolf lips curling.
“You're a very beautiful girl you know. I'm lucky I found you,” she murmured, eying me critically. I did the same back, hollowly as through my eyesight was a myopic thing. I pretended to see past her skin and into the marrows of her bones. I pretended I knew every detail of her past, every lover she had ever had and how their ascension to heaven was quickly denied for the lustful remaints of hell. For a moment I thought to ask her had she ever been with a woman but she lit up a fag, and leaned back against the wall, the black thing that covered her exposed the smooth, tender flesh of her thigh. It was a thing meant and seen. It was known but never to be spoken. I could see the way she watched my lips, how her eyes took intently where my hands moved, how the water fell, rolled from collarbone to the end of nipples. But she won't ever say anything. I won't either. That is the way of weakness and love, to admit such a desire, was to be the first to break such a delicate line. Then, the magic is broken.
