The Taste of Blood

Chapter One

It was another restless night at the end of a basement party that felt just like every other. I had thought maybe if Bones was there, I could slink into her room when the long night was winding down. I would pull her aside, ask to talk, and then I would say that I was sorry for everything that happened with Lip. She should know that I hadn't meant to kiss him, he was just there! If someone hadn't given me Molly earlier and if it hadn't been months since I'd done it last and if everything hadn't felt so god damn beautiful and delicious to touch then none of this would have ever happened. It was just a tolerance thing.

She should have seen that I really meant it. She should know me better than that. But she hadn't had she? Instead I am pounding the pavement in my chewed up Doc Martens trying to get back to my suffocating studio apartment and the ground underneath my feet feels hollow and flat.

All of the things that she hadn't done are playing in my mind and eating me alive. She hadn't taken me up to her room. We hadn't kissed and she hadn't bit my lip and she hadn't shoved me up against her closet door with its loose and broken wooden slats from all the other times she'd done it. I didn't fall asleep in her arms to the thrum of the bass through the floorboards from the dudes still fucking around down in the basement after the show was long over and the girls had gone home or paired off with the same old house guys that lived upstairs and lurked around every show. Fuck!

Instead, I had showed up with my lacy spiral tights that she had called "hypnotic" once, the ones with only a few runs in them, and I had gotten my eyeliner just right for once. It was packed that night, and it took almost an hour to find her while still looking nonchalant. But the second she saw me she turned to some other girl, whispered something in her ear, taken her by the hand and run up the stairs. Away from me. Then of all people, Lip had come right up to me with that stupid smirk he always has and I was so mad I could cry but he took me by my hand anyway. I tried to pull away but he was hammered and must have thought I just couldn't keep up, then we were in the pit and the music was a cacophony of noise that thrummed in my ears.

My heart was breaking and I was surrounding by drunk punks in this basement show that reeked of days old boy sweat and cheap beer with the same band I had heard at least six times before playing the same songs badly. There was Lip, shoving and shouting and banging his head, looking like an idiot. I wanted to yell at him for ruining my life but he wouldn't have heard me so I just shoved hard and let myself be shoved over and over until someone's elbow made contact with my nose and then blood was gushing out warm down to my chin. Lip had stopped then after a few seconds, his thinking still drunk and slow, and he was reaching out for me with something like tenderness. But I didn't want him to touch me, so I shoved him and he was flat on his ass as I turned and ran the hell out of there.

It was a long walk back to my place and my feet were sore and my thighs chafed from rubbing against one another through the tights, but I didn't care. As I walked, I touched my nose gingerly, it felt swollen and hot. My fingers drifted tentatively down to my upper lip, and I felt twin rivulets of half dried blood there that had smeared on my lips and dribbled on my chin. If only Bones could see me now. Absentmindedly my hands worked to chip off the dried bits of blood as I fumed and stomped towards my apartment.

From three doors down, I can hear that there is shouting in the neighbors' apartment on the second floor again. It's four in the morning and I wonder where they get this energy from every night. Did they both stay up all night running the same midnight wave or is this them first thing in the morning? Some part of me was jealous, at least they cared enough to fight. I walked closer to the building, an old Victorian chopped up and remodeled into apartments, and tried to see their shadows in the windows. Their windows were lit up the cool blue of overhead lighting but I couldn't see any shadows, so they must be further back in the apartment. Above their windows, I gazed at the empty black of my attic studio apartment and felt a pang of emptiness in my chest.

It wasn't right for me to go home alone yet. How I felt now, I never wanted to sleep again but just walk forever into the dark night until I felt nothing at all, until I was nothing, just a ghost or a memory. So I turned and kept walking, and not even the cold bite of a fall night could nip at me then.