MOMMY ISSUES | Tamber

33

The bedroom lies enshrouded in silver-tinged shadows cast by the ghostly moon burning beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. Its pallid glow washes over the sleek modern furnishings and wide, undisturbed expanse of the king-sized mattress.

Tara's achingly familiar silhouette is framed starkly against the backlit gauze curtains fluttering in the night breeze. She stands with her naked back to the room, slim shoulders shuddering with scarcely suppressed sobs muffled behind one trembling hand.

The other arm wraps protectively around her midsection - a gesture of wounded vulnerability belied by the criss-crossing ruin of ugly, inflamed slashes defiling the pale canvas of skin. Lurid evidence of her recent self-immolation gleaming with sadistic accusation.

Behind her, the en-suite bathroom door creaks open in a gravid exhalation, cloaking the room in a temporary veil of steam and the steady, pounding cadence of a shower's spray.

In the ensuing hush, Amber emerges from the swirling mists completely nude - alabaster skin beaded with moisture and loose tendrils of raven hair slicked flat against the elegant bones of her face and throat.

She pauses in the diffuse light spilling out from the bathroom, contemplating Tara's crumpled form with an expression of such profound detachment that it could scarcely parse as human. Her features remain exquisitely composed despite the heaving convulsions of bone-deep sobs still wracking the smaller woman at the window.

Then, very slowly, Amber extends one arm - fingers trailing whisper-soft against the needlework of scars adorning Tara's flesh as she draws herself into the intimate splinter of space behind her.

The sharp inhalation of breath abrading Tara's nape is the sole preamble before Amber's free hand ascends in a slithering caress, fisting in the wet tangle of chestnut hair and wrenching Tara's head back at an agonizing angle that arches her spine taut as carbon fiber.

Their torsos meld together from the insistent friction of Amber's advance: sinuous muscle melding seamlessly with Tara's rib-thin fragility into a single, predatory shape-shift. As if no quarter-inch of breath or sin could dare remain between the two halves of a mythic, dual-natured beast.

Tara's choked gasp dissolves into a subterranean keen of unvarnished anguish as the brutal positioning draws her lacerated forearm up into unmistakable visibility for them both once more. The desecrated swaths of skin gape like obscene kissing wounds against the shrouding lunar gloom--cradled now in the uncompromising silhouette forged between Amber's upraised arm and Tara's fragile, pinioned form in her thrall.

Amber does not relent the distending torque of her crushing restraint, nor the fevered brands of shared flesh igniting wherever their sweat-slicked contours meld and writhe as one. On the contrary, her grip seems to intensify by slow, lascivious degrees until bones and musculature tremble in visceral thrall beneath her remorseless possession.

Then her lips descend with seismic finality, splitting apart with an incandescent hiss against the sensitized whorls of Tara's inner ear even as the first pearlescent tears are wrenched free in searing tracks down her pallid cheeks.

"I should leave you in bloody ruin for this, you wretched thing. Dismantled into the shrieking pieces befitting whatever pathetic self-delusions you've labored under all this time." Amber said. She punctuates each toneless phrase by dragging her sharpened incisors with infinite, devouring slowness along the swan-white curvature of Tara's exposed throat. A monstrous branding that leaves flushed, throbbing emblems of possession in its wake. "To think you'd actually attempt to leave this exquisite suffering behind...renege on our timeless bondage to each other through such a blasphemously weak gesture as wrist-slitting in a shower stall?"

One relentless hand skates lower to seize and constrict Tara's chest in a crushing vise until her remaining shudders devolve into a gurgling, airless crescendo. All while she hangs impossibly arched and strung between the hardline crush of Amber's unforgiving physique and her painfully cramped, semi-upright position.

Amber's lips trail fractionally lower still, scorching the blistered path of a serpent's unspooling toxic venom down the swept column of Tara's neck until their pulses thunder in searing concert. "Don't you understand yet, my breathtaking idiot girl? There is no exit from this crucible. From the ravenous, eternal dark we swore ourselves into with every caress...every barbarous desire bleeding from your profane loins." She hissed. "Only one road lies ahead for us together now, my perfect ruin...from which there remains no return for either."

Her grip preserving the last gossamer tether to consciousness, Amber draws back just far enough to drink in the harrowing spectacle of Tara's silent, soul-scorched dissolution at last.

Every nuance of devastation and deathless surrender hollowing out her exquisite features in the silvered gloom. Until it seems their entire macabre, blighted existence reaching its ultimate crescendo in that hunger-glazed vacuum of eyes and parted lips frozen forever on the profane brink of total, irrevocable annihilation.