A rose to grind

-24-

        Wetness soaked my forehead, awakening me from a deep slumber, pulling me free from a chamber of darkness I didn't know I had been contained in until I saw a light seep into my vision, splashing colors from the previous darkness. I stirred groggily, hand mechanically capturing a thick wrist.

"Stop," my own voice was hoarse, rugged, belonging to that of a thirsty man isolated on an deserted island. I ignored the splinters aching in my muscles, which I could fortunately feel by now. With much difficulty, I proceeded to sit up, and a hand maneuvered its way onto my back, aiding me as I laid back against a wooden headboard.

"Kage," a tone full of sempiternal fervour and tenderness circulated beside my ear, chapped lips grazing against my earlobe. They pulled away, luckily, and a screeching noise of a chair scraping against the floor followed subsequently. "Can you feel your legs?"

The pads of a finger pressed down on my kneecap, gradually traveling upwards until it rested on my inner thigh, a few centimeters from my crouch. An inaudible gasp slipped past my lips, and I immediately caught their hand. Forcing my eyelids open, I met a pair of darkened emerald orbs, and an immediate intensity swallowed me whole. The eyes that focused on me felt like a thousand hands grasping at my body, invading the places I desperately wished to hide. He was peeling one, by one, the layers of my body just by eyeing me down.

It was a feeling I didn't find pleasant.

"Your hand," I said, wrenching it away, "is one naughty entity."

"Sometimes it has a mind of its own," a knowing smile graced his delicate features, "I apologize."

A heinous headache, similar to that of a hammer consecutively pounding against my head, invaded and prodded my temples. I pressed down on them, rubbing along the puckered lines of my forehead. Following suit after the headaches, came an ache in my sides. This feeling was like a drill was digging into my skin, breaking through the bones, disintegrating them against my will. My body folded on its own instinctively, and a hand which was not of mine, thumbed at my injury, exerting subtle force, causing a wince out of me.

"Stop pressing down on it!" I fussed, the pressure pulling yet another aggrieved gasp out from my own mouth, "Do you want me to die?"

"I saved you," the words flew out of the man's mouth easily. He grasped my chin while another unoccupied hand clasped the back of my neck, gently tipping my head back, so that I maintained eye-contact with him. He was staring so intensively I almost flustered. Slowly, his mouth moved, "And because I saved you, you cannot die without my permission."

"Fucking crazy bastard," a fusillade of curses flew out of my mouth. The features on my face contorted uglily. But, because I was unable to move my limbs, I only had the ability to move my head from side-to-side, but that wasn't enough to free me from his vice-like grip. He was like a python, once capturing his prey, took his sweet time to devour them to accentuate the taste.

I was confident I didn't taste that scrumptious.

"I'll die if I want to. How does that concern you?"

"Everything about you is my business," the man's face grew sterner, even grave. It almost made me chuckle out of the irony that he had resembled the man in the painting, 'The Scream,' by Edvard Munch. The primal, overwhelming fear, that out of his control, took by storm of his features. There was a somber crack in his voice, when he pleaded and begged, "Kage, don't leave me, okay? Please? Without you, this world means nothing to me. You— You are my world."

There was only one thing I thought: my savior was absolutely mental.

But my feigned calm crumbled at the seams by his desperate, loving touches, as though I were a vase taped together by broken pieces, and was about to get again crumble.