Cut You Up.

You wake up and it’s four o’clock in the morning. Or maybe you didn’t wake up; maybe you just never went to bed. Oh well, it’s four a.m. and you’re up. That’s the point.

You have to leave your room. You have to stay quiet. You have to stop by the kitchen for a knife. You have to check all of these things off of your mental to-do list.

You reach his door and it’s a crack open. He’s asleep. Then again, most sane people are at four o’clock in the fucking morning. This has to be quick and neat… as neat as it can be. With all of the redredred, it’s rather hard to keep things clean.

He always sleeps with his palms lying over his face, exposing his arms to the whole world. His pale skin glistens in the moonlight and the ruby-red of his scars shine like macabre diamonds. Just the sight of the scabbed over flesh is enough to give you an ear-to-ear grin. It’s a good thing this kid hates himself, or else he would notice the extra cuts every morning.

It’s not that you don’t love him. You love him dearly. That’s why you carve hearts into his fingertips and kiss all of the twenty-three scars that decorate his beautiful arms every single night. You love him so much. You want to suck away his pain every night.

You don’t want anyone to hurt him. You have to hold him close and suck away his sadness. No one can hurt him. Not even himself.

Shake you’re head and try to forget. Try to forget the first time you saw his blood. He was crying on the bathroom floor and you were staring at his bloody arms and legs and flesh and everything and Oh God, and you were trying to control yourself. Its not cannibalism if you don’t eat the flesh.

You kiss his forehead. The spit leaves a shiny mark. You think about pouring lye on it. Just because. Because it would be nice to mark him further; to claim his as your’s yet again. But you don’t. That’d be stupid. He’d wake up. You don’t have any lye lying around, anyway.

You press the knife to his soft warm skin and rip it across. Never too deep, we don’t want to hurt him; we just want to draw blood. He twitches a bit, gasping then calming down into a comfortable sleep. Science says that humans are in the deepest sleep between midnight and six a.m., so he should be out cold.

Four is the magic number, always at four in the morning on Wednesday—the fourth day of the week—and always four new cuts. Two on the right arm, one on the left, and a heart on any finger of his left hand. He’s always so silly, not even noticing the new scars. Maybe he has noticed. Maybe he just doesn’t even care.

You press a napkin to his index finger and soak up the blood the heart left. You never take that blood; you’re not sure why.

You first lower your head to his left arm. You press your lips to the warm crimson substance and drink slowly. He lets out a small sigh of pleasure. You're draining him and he loves it.

It has a metallic taste that is simply enthralling. You clean it up so that the blood has stopped dripping and move to the right arm. This arm takes a bit longer because there is one more opening for the blood to trickle out. Once it’s done you count. Twenty-six. Each one gets a kiss. Twenty-six kisses… that’s a lot of lye.

Then you cuddle in next to him. You’re completely ready to hear the stories about his nightmares tomorrow. About how a vampire came in and sucked his blood. But he liked it. He always tells you how he enjoys the vampire taking his blood and draining the life slowly from his arms/neck/wherever. So you decide to stay up and play vampire every Wednesday. Every fourth day of the week.

You wrap you’re completely scar-free arms around his body. You kiss his cheek. Sometimes he wakes up when you kiss him (but never while you’re cutting and he’s bleeding), and you tell him you had a bad dream and needed company. He smiles and wraps his arms around you and whispers nothingness into your ear. You are so bloody in love with him…no pun intended.

He starts to tell you about his dream/nightmare and you silence him with a kiss before he can say the word “vampire.”