The One

Tabitha Rayne

As she runs
the tip of her tongue over the ridges – the un-natural ridges that I created, I try and hold myself steady. Try not to retreat inside myself and tell her to leave. She is at the first. She is going to go through every single one of them in chronological order, I know it.

I fight the urge to pull my black polo neck back over my nakedness and hide away.

“Shhh,” she soothes, her soft firm voice at once cradles and commands. “Let me do this.”

I wonder at her perception. She can sense the tiniest shift in my body, my mood, my thought pattern. It’s disconcerting and  comforting at the same time and I sigh away my tension, forcing my body down into the carpet. She’s told me she’ll melt me. I
don’t believe her but she seems determined enough.

She’s onto the next. Her hot little tongue flirting with the ragged bumps. The crass ones, before I learned to control myself. Before I’d perfected my art. Half of me wishes she’d skip those and get to the beautiful ones, but I don’t say anything,
I just concentrate on unfurling the tight, cringing nerve endings that keep me bound into my own skin.

“This is where it started,” she’s onto the third. And she’s right. How can she know
that? How can she tell the first two were afterthoughts, a result of a furious outburst.

“Yes,” I hear myself whisper, the tremor in my voice far too apparent. She’ll be angry.
Will she?

“Yes, this is the one when you began to know who you are.”

“How can you tell?” I ask, curiosity suddenly dispelling my nerves.

“It’s smoother.”

I lift my upper body to study the arm she’s holding in her hands. It’s my arm. But today, it feels disconnected. “Only slightly,” I say, a little fearful of contradicting her.

“Yes, but it’s deliberate. It took time to do this one.”

She’s right of course. The first two were just angry slashes. A slice of passionate fury directed at myself. I had no idea what I was doing. The third had been a considered endeavour. I’d set out my tools (one knife, one cloth) and very slowly and carefully dragged open a long cut.

I had been disappointed by the blood. I hadn’t wanted that to happen. I wanted to keep all that in. I wanted the sweet release but not to let anything pour out of me. I’m selfish like that. What’s mine is mine. I keep it all in. I don’t even talk much in case I escape from myself. Let myself go. Say something needy, or stupid.

She moves to the next. Raised and smooth with silvery edges. It’s the same but entirely
different. That’s the point where I began to learn my craft.

She runs her tongue hard across the red inner cleft and I twitch, sensations breaking free from the source and running across my skin – penetrating more than flesh. I almost tell her to stop but it is horrifically exquisite. She groans and saliva coats her lips as she mouths my scar, taking its length into her hot undulating pout.

I am getting aroused. The swelling heat between my legs brings with it a pulse that tweaks up to my nipples. She notices. Of course she does and flicks her eyes up to meet mine, just quickly before moving to the next.

Again she glides the flat moist muscle over my pulled and puckered skin. A moment in time captured forever by my art.

I remember so clearly when I realised that heat would seal my wound. I could have my release without needing an actual release. It was a perfect moment. Time around me stilled as if I were the eye of a storm when I ignited the flame to warm my
blade.

The pain was searing and lasting but there was no blood. It was perfect.

She bypasses the long slither on my bicep and goes straight to my shoulder. 

How did she know? How did she know I did that one after he had done what he did? It was
nothing to you or any normal person. Only a man I’d once looked at. He hadn’t looked back and I lost my nerve to speak. I learned my lesson and never looked again. But she had known the torture it had brought and skipped that one. My wonder for her has doubled again. I feel something stir in my chest – a
swelling that is mirrored in my throat. I feel I could choke as it expands and I have to gulp. I don’t express emotion well, and I am recognising what this might be. I do not want to cry. No. I have the urge to stand up and shove her off me, tell her to Fuck Off, but I lie still. Enveloped in static fear and arousal.

“You’re all right,” she says and her silken fingers wrap around my shoulders and knead at my clenching coils. I can practically hear the ping as they unwind and the ball of emotion slowly disperses. She smoothes her palms down my naked right arm. One day, I hope she may be the one to help with that side. The one practicality I never got my head around. How to make a perfect job with my left hand.

I suddenly stop and think about what I’ve just thought. I allowed her in to my future. I
let it happen in my mind.

I focus back on her touch which is now just above my right knee.

She massages the lines and the muscles beneath. It is rhythmic and delicious. My mouth waters and my sex feels moist. I clamp down instinctively. She keeps rubbing, her fingers deftly working up each of my scars, making them more meaningful and beautiful with every touch. I want to open my legs. I don’t.

She is dangerously close to the very top of my inner thigh – the fleshy pillow that guards my cunt. I tense. She slides both hands in between like an inverted prayer and prises me open.

“Stop,” I whisper with my breath held so high in my chest I doubt she’s heard it.

Maybe she has. She retreats down and begins to kiss the scars on my left leg now, where they begin just above the knee. She’s about to reach my favourite one. My best prize. I remember the joy of running back to my apartment and getting my equipment out for that very one. I remember catching a glimpse of my own smiling face in the kitchen mirror as I opened the drawer and pulled out my knife. I remember drawing the heated blade so perfectly across the skin that I came. I came in my mind and I came in my body.

She’s at it now. She’s at it. I tremble, my flesh peaking and swelling at its own memory.

“This is my favourite one,” she says, and I gasp. I lift up onto both elbows and grin like a lunatic, excitement spreading through every cell in my body. “It’s so perfect.” I can smell the fragrance of saliva and arousal as I slowly slide my legs apart for her to reach the very start of her scar. “What’s this one’s story?” she asks, though I believe she must know somehow already.

“That’s the first time I ever saw you,” I say…

So there it is – just the beginning. A version of this was in Written on The Skin published by  Burning Books Press – which sadly is no more.

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