MOMMY ISSUES | Tamber

31

Steam swirls in languid, milky tendrils throughout the opulent marble-tiled space, dappling the mirrored surfaces with streaks of condensation.

The spacious glass-walled shower enclosure is already fogged with vapor, obscuring all but the indistinct, shifting silhouette within as the opening swell of the shower's spray cascades down.

After a moment, the blurred outline behind the translucent partition resolves into the unmistakable form of Tara - head angled upwards as she works a lather of shampoo through her chestnut tresses.

A soft, wistful melody escapes her slightly parted lips, interwoven with the ambient thrum of the steaming torrent. For all outward indications, it seems her typical tranquil morning ritual - a tempered oasis amidst the encroaching tempest enveloping their lives.

The illusion proves achingly short-lived.

With a faint, mechanical rasp of metal over ceramic, the shower door slides open behind her unawares. Then the impervious silence shatters beneath a clatter of bottles and accessories scattered across the tiled floor and Tara's startled gasp as a second, predatory silhouette resolves in the billowing veil of steam.

Amber slips into the confines of the shower with the insidious grace of a serpent coiling around its prey. Flicking dripping tendrils of hair back over one bare shoulder, she advances purposefully forward until they're separated only by a scant ember's breadth of humid space.

Even in this realm of fleeting intimacy, her presence outwardly betrays not a single flicker of warmth or invitation. Au contraire, each crisply defined line and angle of her naked form seems gilded in well-muscled menace - from the sinewy forearms tensed at her sides, to the razor-sharp jut of her collarbones and the liquefied emerald of her eyes shimmering with banked, profoundly disquieting intent.

Tara remains poised as if fused in place, wary confusion flickering like heat lightning across her porcelain features. But any subatomic hesitance is banished in an electrifying instant the moment their bodies make contact.

"You shouldn't." Amber said, with a quite raspy breath, It's all the preamble given before Amber's panther-sleek form is pressing insistently closer, penning Tara back against the scalding tile walls in a forcefully assertive cage of tensed, gleaming muscle.

The sudden implosion of personal space and Amber's molten proximity forces the air from Tara's lungs in a shuddering half-gasp of dread and rapt, impossible expectation melded as one.

Her throat works convulsively, every molecule seeming to thrum and vibrate between them like an overdriven Tesla coil as Amber drifts fractionally closer still. The preternatural tension crests with the collision of their slicked skin and the searing communion of their mouths - a shattering clash of teeth and rampant desire more violent than any embrace of true lovers.

For a handful of gut-churning eternities, Tara surrenders to the ferocious, overwhelming undertow of Amber's possessive ardor - arching instinctively into the searing press of her remorseless assault.

Yet her submerged survival reflex provides the anchor restraining this plunging descent into carnal madness. Twisting with unexpected, leonine alacrity, Tara seizes Amber's roving hands in a steel vise grip and succeeds in prying a few crucial, gasping inhalations of space between them. 

"Amber...What the hell are y--?" Tara starts to question but her lover doesn't permit even that breathless utterance to wrest complete dominance. Slamming Tara back into the unyielding wall behind her, Amber wrests her hands free and pins them overhead in a crushing, leonine grasp--razor-etched cheekbones mere fractional degrees from Tara's skin.

So intimately close now that every ravenous pant of condensation-laced breath they expel marinates their mingled flesh in supercharged static. And when those smoldering jade pools unmoor themselves at last, something feral and unrestrained blazes forth with the visceral intensity of a solar corona viewed through a pinhole aperture.

"THAT." Amber shouts, in the flash of revelation accompanying her single sibilant syllable, Amber drags Tara's wrists down between their sweat-slicked bodies. Allowing her right hand to dangle at the end of her tensed tricep in sickening, punitive disregard.

Tara's eyes pinball down the trajectory inescapably demanded by Amber's re-positioning... and all the air evacuates her lungs in a single, gut-lurching whoosh. Because there, nestled in the porcelain cradle of flesh and bone, the exposed inside of her wrist is livid with a series of parallel, violently self-mutilated lacerations.

Endlessly deep crimson furrows seething hotly against the misted spray cascading down around them both. The grim, unmistakable insignia of Tara's inner fracture rendered permanently visible for Amber's merciless examination.

Yet she doesn't merely observe in hideous, soul-scorching silence. Pressing the injury cruelly into Tara's line of sight, Amber leans fractionally closer until her lips seem to burn like twin vents to the heart of a blast furnace against the trembling whorls of Tara's ear.

"Did you honestly believe I wouldn't notice, hmmm? That my little girl-wife would somehow conceal the depths of her pathetic...decay from me?" Amber questioned her wife, with those heated, disdain-laced words still simmering between them, Amber hurls Tara's arm aside like a rag. She then rears back slightly, seizing Tara's face in a punishing, vice-like grip that painfully compresses her features. So close now that their roiling, vaporous breaths mingle and churn in a primal, suffocating synthesis as Amber forces her to meet her blazing,raptor-intense stare. "Everything you are or ever will be belongs to me, Tara. Your soul, your flesh...even the forsaken destiny of your crumbling sanity. None shall ever be beyond my total dominion or awareness."

She drags her glistening naked body along Tara's with undisguised, remorseless possession: searing muscle rippling and tensing as she presses impossibly closer yet.

Their mingled pulses thunder in concert with the drum of the water's merciless torrent cascading down upon them both. "Not a single inch of your shattered being shall slip its leash from my control."

Tara thrashes convulsively, overwhelmed by the visceral dread radiating off Amber in seismic waves, before her soaked, flailing limbs are seized and pinned immobile once more. "Attempt to defy me again with your pitiful self-destruction, and I shall leave you wishing for the consummate extinction you'd so greedily embrace, my love. You are mine. Every breath, every heartbeat, every filthy little masochistic urge pumping through those veins now and unto annihilation itself. So. Help. Me--"

Those final three ruthless syllables seem to detonate the very air separating them in that seething, vapor-laced vortex as Amber slams Tara back against the scalding tile wall once more.

The final blow shudders through her until bones feel pulverized in their sockets. Her vision swims in tangents of blurred color and sensation, swimming toward unconscious release--

--yet