Snow

29 | don't touch me

❝they all wanna get rough,
get away with it.❞

||

MY HANDS WON'T STOP SHAKING.

"Fuck!" I slam my palm against the steering wheel. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

It's that lethal cocktail of fear and anger, retching, rattling, ricocheting inside of me, like stray stars and lost bullets. A messy veil of tears smears the dashboard into a black blur, fringes stealing inches of my vision too quick to blink away.

Cada momento of the last hour feels hazy—a surreal spiral of sleepwalking through smoke.

When I screw my eyes shut, I only see fragments, slivers, shards of his smile, looming above me in contorted darkness. A hooded expression, teasing, almost playful, so sinister that the foggy memory evokes an icy shiver.

My head spins. I can feel my teeth chatter.

"I know you like it, but don't fuck with it too much," he'd said. "It can get real cold."

...cold metal, dancing along my throat, leaving an icy trail of fire in its wake... a splintering facade of black ice, glinting in the lingering hours of a monochromatic night... the chilling tone in his voice, laden with an ice-cold promise, lost in the sting of my cheek...

The crack in my chest splits, gouges open, and the rush is instant—an anxious gust of billowing air, frío y implacable, stealing my breath, and numbing, numbing, numbing. That biting wind laces around my lungs, weaves around my heart; everything clenches under the raw assault.

My hands won't stop fucking shaking.

I open my eyes, clench my fingers around the steering wheel, and force myself to fucking freeze.

The tremors wrack through me, waves of whistling panic and ripples of arctic air. I can feel it unraveling inside of me—a snowstorm of self-inflicted shame.

"Neva, you are too easy... Half of the men here already know how you suck dick... Such a slut... I knew Rivera's girl was a slut, but damn, that was easy... I saw the way you looked at me that day. Practically asking for it."

"Don't lie, Neva."

It inches... pricks... digs beneath my skin. Cada palabra is jagged, plunging through papery armor with no remorse; they scratch, itch, gnaw beneath fiber and pulp until it's concentrated contempt in my bloodstream.

A metallic taste rolls off my tongue—grit and gravel in something beautifully tragic.

My skin is crawling with the feelings.

Gentle, rough, too much, too deep, too hard, no, no, no.

"You like it deep and hard."

Nails carving into skin, yanking at fabric, crying, crying, crying.

"A woman who knows what she likes."

No, no, no.

Choking on a sob, I throw my door open and stumble out. Something inside of me is ticking, like instability and insecurity, a bomb about to explode with the threat of debris and shrapnel, all my fucking baggage, los secretos, los temores, las mentiras, spewed out on the sidewalk. Exposed.

Pressure blooms in my chest; it propels me to the door, panting, panicking, pressing fingers to keys and pushing from the gray night into the darkness of a hallway. My stomach keeps churning and twisting and somersaulting, clenching with the dread of each echoing footstep. It starts small—an inkling of anger that builds, ascending the staircase and spiking into blinding rage.