Eager to Shatter

She was Gin and Polka Dots—a heady pink cloud of laughter and grinning promises. She'd spin her rings around her fingers, letting her tongue peek between her teeth. Feminine. Here she'd hide and be whole while the room orbited around her in sparkly, boozy circles.

He caught her eye with a wink and a raised glass. In little time, she was tickling his ear with breaths that made him shiver.

“Beautiful,” he crowed over and over, the adoration strung between each bitter drink. A finger played along her spine through her thin dress, dipping in the vertebrae, shuffling her close to him. She drank it in like a prayer, devouring the reassurances, letting validations coat her thick, like sap.

She swam deep in the wild, free moment, where she was a thing of want, his face flushed with heat and desire.

“Come,” he whispered, fingers twined and pulling her up stairs and elevators as he mouthed her collarbone with muted sentiments and tangy breaths.

The Hall. The door. The Key. The room.

Dim lights—hands fisted into the blue of her dress. She huffed in weighty breaths, watching every dilation of his eyes as fabric crawled up her thighs, her fingers starting to shake. The languid movements were madness, because the watery wall of reality built high, fat and heavy, looming overhead, eager to shatter. Another inch of skin. Another breath.

Eager to shatter. And she must be, to be here, baring herself like Eve as he ripped her final clothes from her, the fragile mask that they were.

He stepped back, hands slipping away, eyes roaming, wide and renegade, the dream undone.

She closed her eyes, tight:

Take me. Hold me. Love me.

She gulped down time in the fragile moments, watching as the warm touches of earlier disintegrated, adoration melting away from him.

Hate me. Leave me. Hurt me.

“Fuck you.” He shoved her dress against her chest, her legs unsteady as she was pushed into the empty hallway. Away from the warmth of compliments and gentle touch.

The door closed with finality and she looked down at the body that betrayed her, yet again. Took in the hard, sharp lines of hipbones, and smooth flat planes across her chest. Took in the traitorous bits of skin and groin.

Beautiful. Feminine. Woman, she thought.

But, the mirror at the end of the hall reflected her bare skin mockingly, whispering back:

“Forgotten. Broken. Man.”