A familiar silhouette is slouched by the tree. Trystain’s usual jacket has been cast aside, and as I approach I notice a potently sweet smell as he lifts something to his face.
“I thought you quit smoking,” I remark. Trystain looks up, gives me a once-over, and then turns back to his doobie, motioning for me to come closer. Furrowing my brows, I bend down towards him. He promptly blows a lungful of smoke in my face. I choke, collapsing to the grass in an admittedly exaggerated fit of coughing, as Tryss calmly takes another drag.
“Why did you do that?” I gasp, still trying to rid myself of the acrid haze.
“No reason,” he shrugs.
“Ugh, what is that? It stinks!” I nag. “Put it out, would you? I don’t want to start feeling weird.”
“Oh, shut up,” Trystain groans; as he says it, he startles me by slumping over to rest his head on my shoulder. I blink at him and then glance disapprovingly at the joint in his hand.
“Tryss, are you high?”
“Can’t get goddamn high anymore,” he slurs. “Smoking just calms me down.”
“Right,” I respond skeptically. “But I thought you quit.”
“Just be quiet. Like when you’re depressed. Get depressed, yeah?” he grunts, nestling into the crook of my neck. I shy away as his nose brushes my jugular and a smoky exhalation washes over my skin. His eyelashes feel like wingtips when he blinks. Shifting uncomfortably at his uncharacteristic closeness, my gaze happens upon Trystain’s bare arm, which the jacket sleeve usually covers. The scars zigzagging erratically back and forth over his skin are cut by a long indentation that that travel the length of his forearm. This strikes me nearly as profoundly as my first glimpse of the scars he bears; he’s gone “down the road” with his razor. I glance at Trystain and find him eyeing the scars as well. He rolls towards me with a groan, spontaneously wrapping his arms around me in a clumsy hug.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he mumbles. “Hey, let’s run away. You ‘n me. We’ll go to…” He pauses to think. “Europe. Let’s go run off to Europe and get high every goddamn day.”
I roll my eyes but awkwardly pat his back. “Tryss, we’re not running away. I’ve got stuff to do here. My parents would worry.”
He moans a complaint like a little kid being woken up for school, nuzzling closer to me. “Can we just stay here?”
“No, I’m not sticking around just for you.”
“Are you still mad at me?”
I start, caught off guard by the sudden earnestness. This isn’t like him at all. Is he just messing with me? Hesitating, I reply with honesty that surprises even me. “No, I’m not. Are you mad at me?”
“You can’t have your razor back.”
A twinge of mild irritation jabs at me, followed by mixed feelings of bitterness, disappointment, and the grudging admission that for the most part, it’s probably a good thing. With brutal slowness, I realize that he is looking out for me again. A furtive itch tickles my cuts. I shift to scratch my arm, which must bother Trystain because he pulls away and settles with his elbows resting on his knees sullenly.
The kids on the playground squeal and giggle ecstatically and the sun breathes comfortable warmth over me. Out of the corner of my vision I can see Tryss patting around for something, muttering about “A goddamn waste of weed.” My nails rake my arm. What was I thinking? I come to talk to Trystain, and he’s stoned. I tell myself I wanted to change my hairstyle, but I wanted to draw his attention to my neck. My ponytail bounces in the breeze, and resentfully, I pull out the rubber band and toss it somewhere in the grass. Trystain’s eyes follow it lazily.
I thought I wanted acknowledgement. I did, but I want more than that. Why? Will the wanting ever stop? Is it not good enough to be a blood donor if I’m not the only one? Is it so horrible that I’m not the most miserable cutter in the world? Isn’t it okay to be selfish? I grit my teeth.
“Tryss.” He grunts a response. “Do you trust me?”
A quizzical look flickers on his face, and he shrugs. “I dunno. Why?”
That isn’t good enough. Not for this ingrate, this selfish, selfish, human girl. Placing my hand on his scarred arm, I press my mouth to his lips.
Kissing isn’t quite the magical experience it’s made out to be, although I think my kiss with Trystain was pretty mediocre anyway. Neither of our lips were perfectly smooth or moist, and though I had instigated the kiss, I had no idea what to do with my mouth after our lips had molded together. I’m not sure what it is I wanted from it. Whatever it is, I break away disappointed with a faint flavor of marijuana. My gaze lingers wistfully on his lips and then lifts to his eyes, two cool and steady seas undiluted by foam. The corner of his mouth tilts upwards.
“Happy?” he prompts. I look away and shake my head. There is a chuckle and then he slumps heavily against me again. “Kisses aren’t worth much,” he tells me. “Sometimes they’re just goddamn awkward.”
“But it wasn’t awkward,” I retort, throwing my hands up in the air. “It wasn’t good or bad. It wasn’t worth anything!”
“What’d you expect? Fireworks?”
“I just—I don’t know,” I admit. “I wanted…” I trail off, unsure how to finish the sentence.
“A vampire romance story?” Trystain quips. “Love? A goddamn make-out session? Well, sorry, but that doesn’t happen for people like us. Once you decided to start hating yourself, you gave up any chance at loving someone else.” I can tell by his tone that he’s rapidly working himself up as he sits up and continues, “Your kind of kiss is dead because it doesn’t mean anything. You married despair. You made love to a goddamn razor. Now all that’s left is to wait to die, but even that’s been taken from you! It’s all because of her! Her and that goddamn blood, but that’s all that’s left, all that’s real! It’s the goddamn blood!”
He stops shouting at me to fist something from his eye with a snarl. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he growls at the ground. “Just a goddamn…goddamn…”
After mumbling a few incoherent sentences, Tryss seems to remember that I’m still there and raises a pair of bleak sanguine eyes to my face. The color burns my retinas, so passionate, so red, so like the blood on metal and so like the love that I lost and the hatred I have, like what the kiss was supposed to be but lacked; and in that moment I know what I tried to get from the kiss that meant nothing. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” Juliet had mused blithely to herself. But what of those who prefer the scent of cyclamen?
I never loved Her. I never loved her because She is my hate, my ugliness, my masochism and all the good I’ve rejected. He never loved her because she tried to save him and She reminded him of himself. We never loved her. We need to, but we don’t. The rejection torments us because rejecting something doesn’t mean you don’t want it, and now, as I reach out to Trystain and draw his face to my throat, I know that I want to be normal. I want to love and be loved, to kiss like other people do. But I can’t and I’m too prideful to admit that I regret damning myself, so I let Trystain crush me in an anaconda’s embrace and endure the sharp pang in my neck. Enfolding eachother like the petals of a venomous blossom, we collapse to the grass still connected, my arms wound around his neck and his holding me stubbornly to him. I hope the God that I don’t believe in is watching this devil’s kiss as we reject, reject, reject all the good left undone.
Trystain was right. The agonizingly simple answer is acceptance. The bars of stinging logic cage only the minds that long to be free of them.
With a warm trail of blood leaking down my neck, I find my fate. Its color is ruby red.
