Page 98 of Shattered
EPILOGUE
one year later
Rourke
When I got out of the shower, a thin sheen of sweat covered my skin instantly, as if I hadn’t been drenched in icy water moments before. Damn humidity. I wiped my brow, then wrapped the towel around my hips, and found Melissa on the patio. The latest painting was almost done: a portrait of one of her new friends, a woman lying on a beach towel, the sun in her eyes.
I wrapped my arms around Melissa’s shoulders, kissing her on the cheek. “It’s beautiful,” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders with a satisfied grin. “Thanks,” she said.
A completed tattoo sleeve full of color in her own intricate designs wound its way around her arm, new ones stretching onto her belly and neck. Melissa was proof that once you got your first tattoo, the rest were soon to follow. She still dyed her hair dark red, arguing that the dye was more like herself than her natural soft black color, hair she had from her mother. I didn’t care about hair dye or colored contacts, as long as she did it for herself, and only herself.
Because I didn’t need that. All I needed was that smile on her face. The painting was beautiful, but Melissa was breathtaking.
I had a few new tattoos myself, letting Melissa use me as her first human canvas. She had started tattooing her designs on me, quickly learned that human skin was quite different than grapefruit skin. I didn’t mind being the test subject. I even asked her to tattoo that same tree on me, with her name etched into the bark, as a show of my commitment to her.
In a short amount of time, she had gained a following through whispers in the streets. People were fascinated with Melissa’s tattoo work, and she booked solid as soon as she opened up for appointments. Tattooing was perfect for her; the clients trusted her artistic insight, and the canvas, their skin, was never truly hers. The exchange fit perfectly with Melissa’s need for the destruction of her art.
With the right connection, we obtained a fabricated tattooing license that would work well enough, should anyone ask. But no one did. Because we were in paradise. There weren’t many things to worry about when you knew everyone had a secret.
Once we moved to our third city, we held a wedding ceremony. The legality of it wasn’t real, but we wore wedding bands and introduced ourselves as husband and wife, even if we knew that tomorrow, that could be ripped away. We lived each day like it might be our last.
Life might not have been what she pictured, but I made sure that she didn’t question where she had come from. Only where we were going.
“You’re going out tonight?” I asked.
“Meeting up with the girls,” she said, nodding. She hadn’t found a complete replacement for her sister-like friends at the Dahlia District, but she had found some interesting people, wanderers like us, who might not last for long but were accepting of her truth. “You don’t mind?”
“No.” I thought of the mask and gloves tucked inside of the tin underneath my side of the bed. “Enjoy yourself. Stay out as long as they do.”
Because with Melissa out with friends, she wouldn’t have to worry about what I did to the monsters in the island’s red-light district.
I pulled her up from the stool and wrapped my arms around her, kissing her bare shoulders, the pecks turning into soft nibbles, giving in to the urge to truly bite her. The night was young, and there was time before she went out. Before I went out too.
I spun her around, marveling at the splotchy red dots on her nose from the night before, the broken blood vessels in her eye from our latest intense fuck. I nuzzled her neck, and she shivered from the tickle of my facial hair on her skin.
Sometimes I wondered if she preferred the mask, or if she enjoyed seeing me when we fucked. But I never asked. I didn’t need the answers.
“Do you ever get tired of this?” I asked her. We looked out at the ocean. The vastness made it seem like we could forget that there was an entire world waiting for us. We were thousands of miles away from Sage City, and it was easy to forget that part of our lives. We buried it under the humidity, the tropical fruit, the odd jobs we worked just to have something to do.
“Never,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “Do you?”
We were living in a dream. I was sharing emptiness and intrigue with someone who understood, who didn’t wonder how she could fix me, and I gave her the same respect. She could have told me she wanted to go to a big city tomorrow, that she was tired of paradise, and we’d pack our bags right now and be on a plane before sundown.
But tonight, after I rid the world of another parasite, I would find her in our bed, and I would kiss her breasts and neck until she woke up, and I would choke her as she came. The release would wake the neighbors, but that was common here. Pleasure, all variations of it, lasted throughout the night.
There were things to be tired of, like the stark injustices of the world, but none of those were Melissa.
“Never,” I said.
THE END
