‘Something’s wrong,’ you heard him say over the violent assault of the colour red that condemned your bathroom.

    You watched from the doorway, panting from the exertion of breaking down the locked door, which now stood unhinged from the torn wooden frame, its metallic lock cascading down onto the tiles like empty bullet casings. For a terrible, eternal moment where your body refused to move, you lingered like a hopeless shadow, afraid to cross over the threshold into the space of the bathroom where he stood bleeding. You could hear the sharp inhales of suffocated breathing, the stray moans from rose lips, as the warm thickness of vermilion appeared to paint the white ceramic. His skin was like paint, a bloodied artistry of awful, agonising pain that two young souls could not mend together the way they could’ve if the world had been kinder.

    And he had been here for hours, you thought again. He was perched over the skin, trying to hold himself together up until the desire to be alone—to not burden someone else to the agony this night seemed to condemn him to—withered away along with everything else. Flesh and blood and that ungodly fucking pain that you had now walked into; making him undone, collapsing him at the seams.

    ‘Tell me again what happened,’ you heard yourself say, over the red, over the smell of crimson leaking all over the tiles and dripping down his neck until it appeared a different colour entirely—blackened and dark and almost as if it were turning to ash in front of him. And maybe it was just the poor yellow lighting in their cigarette-stained apartment’s bathroom, but you could’ve sworn the colour of his whole body was changing, too. His skin leaching of warmth, growing pale and ashen against the blackening blood, his stark veins oozing with something venomous and inhumane. Most frighteningly, his lips were neither purple nor cyanotic as you would expect from such blood loss, but instead darkened to a much deeper, festering rose blush. They looked the way they did between your teeth, raw and human.

    ‘I can’t remember. Someone came up behind me in the alley.’ He had that terrified look to him, the one you hadn’t ever truly seen. It told you enough; that he wanted nothing more than for his lover to pick him up in all his little mosaic shards and sweep him away from his bloodied bathroom that reeked of pungent rust. To lay him in your bed where it was warm and clean and smelled of sleep, but holy fucking god, you weren’t moving.

    He didn’t look like he used to.  There was a bruise in your lungs that you think he put there.

    ‘There was something sharp,’ he strained, teeth gritting together like the words were being pulled from his chest. He had his hands braced against the skin, that awful blackening rot continuously dripping out of his mouth. You wondered why you couldn’t go over to him who was in pain and bleeding out in front of you—stitch him back together, return the favour for the last thousand times when he sewed you up after throwing you against the wall—but your legs wouldn’t work. ‘I feel different.’

    Your paling face turned to somewhere he could not see, if only for a moment, to search for anything that would save you both right now. Your eyes gravitated towards the rosary upon the nightstand, draped across your bible, mocking you. ‘I think you need help…’ you began, unable to finish the sentence. Your voice was strangled, wet-sounding in your throat as if you’d been screaming as he had been, throat raw and mangled and terrified.

     You sounded like this a lot around him.

    ‘I just need you. You can fix this, right?’ he groaned, bearing porcelain white teeth that somehow looked as if they hurt just as much as the rest of him.

    ‘I want to,’ you said because you do.

    ‘It hurts,’ he said.

    And—

    ‘I know,’ you said, again, because you do. 

    He wrapped his hands around the ceramic basin tightly, seemingly feeling himself come apart and undone. Rotten, putrid blood that looked as dark as oil continued to weep against his skin from his mouth, and into the tainted sink below. Infected, darkened veins had erupted from the two wounds in his neck like a spider’s web, littering across his doll-like flesh the same way constellations reigned across the sky. Fang marks, you thought deliriously.

    You heard a deep, pained scream leave his lips as his teeth suddenly shattered like glass, falling out with chunks of rotting gum and oily blood. The noise bounced off the tiles, the broken wooden frame, and you suddenly worried that the neighbour would call the authorities the way they do from time to time—someone was dying, they would say, and they’d be right. This time was different, you’d say, and you’d be wrong.

    Blood as dark as the charcoal he sketched with was now coating his mouth, tainted black scarlet running from his lips and chin, mixing with the awful concoction of rotten teeth in the sink and dying love. And maybe worst of all, his teeth weren’t falling out, but rather being pushed out. Perfectly porcelain fangs took their place where incisors should be.

    Monster. You could see it now.

    And whether it was because of the shock or the torture, he didn’t seem to notice, near still besides panting and gripping the edge of the sink until it cracked underneath his ebony knuckles the way your bones did.

    ‘Love, are you—?’

    ‘I’m okay,’ he said, voice strange. He took his hands away from the basin and refused to look anywhere else but the mirror. You couldn’t see his reflection from beside the broken door frame, but in front of you, his skin was void of colour, looking like the china dolls your sister once played with. His blood was no longer blood, the colour completely that of obsidian, creating your own awful black hole in place of your bathroom. His crazed panting had died by now, and the human reflex of breathing ceased along with it, shattered like the lock on the door, like the teeth in the sink that you used to kiss. Whatever he was looking at in the mirror, you didn’t think that it was something you could love. 

    ‘I feel good.’

    ‘I think I want to leave,’ you said.

    He didn’t listen, didn’t blink. He looked at himself like he thought this was poetic, in some fucked-up, deranged way that he didn’t think anyone else could understand.

    And then he turned to you, bearing a mouth full of knives and covered in the bloodied charcoal until it disintegrated into ash like his cigarette smoke—until he was pale and dead. ‘You can’t leave. I still need you terribly, my love.’

    He met your eyes, and for the first time, they weren’t just lustful; they were insatiable. He took one step forward as you backed away from the condemned room.

    ‘You’ll hurt me,’ you told him.

    ‘I will love your ruins all the same,’ he said and smiled, reaching out. You wouldn’t touch him, and he had that look in his eyes that told you, you are wanted here in this moment more than he’s wanted anyone; and god, did that feel petrifying. It felt like the end.