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And her lips were scarlet madness, dripping with honey and wine, and the problem was that Isabella wanted their bite, whether gentle, whether agony, strangling her in divinity. It was only when her smile faded into Isabella's that she realised that it wasn't wine. It was blood. And it was hers.
The monster settles against her chest, and Isabella knows to satisfy it because it has loved her longer than anyone she knows; and so, she does, she dives into the river of blood, and wonders whether the crops it irrigates will bleed, too. She’s red with love, and the girl she seizes tastes like everything she’s afraid to do.
“Hey,” she says, long, slender fingers tapping against Isabela’s temple, moving to snatch her crown, sauntering across messy hair. She pulls away from her lips, breath still hot against Isabela’s skin, still slotted together, a tangle of limbs and neither of them wishing to undo it.
“You’re thinking so hard that I can hear it creaking,” she says, her voice tingling in the air, causing Isabela’s body to go electric. She doesn’t want to talk, talking is a pact, a promise of equality—she doesn’t want that. She wants to lick divinity from lips, she wants to pretend that God exists in the quaking bodies of female pleasure, that sex can become an act of liberation.
Isabela hums, moves to bite at her throat and she lets her, but she can hear the grumbling as she opens herself. “Don’t you tremble when he comes near you?” she asks, her voice hitching into a gasp at Isabela’s advance, the curve of her hip illuminated in dripping ichor by the light streaming through the crack in the blinds.
“Don’t you feel something when he brings his lips close to yours? Tell me.”
Isabela feels like a wolf lying in wait, when she kisses him. She doesn’t smell the sweet air of devotion, only blood and sweat. Sex with him is a battle, and it’s one that she doesn’t intend to lose. In the dark of the bedroom, is when she can unfurl from a gentle flower and he is not exempt, even if she does not desire him.
Even if sex is a duty more than a choice—she brings the bucket to the well, and she fills it, and she brings him to completion, swallowing without flinching and she does them both with the same conviction and eagerness. The sexual relations she has with her husband are a chore, she’s sure of it.
Maybe, if she had not indulged—she would have believed that was simply the nature of sex. But the forbidden fruit is found in shoemaker’s daughters, travellers and anyone else who knows not to waste themselves on the false god of being able to stay in love.
The ones who, despite the promise of hurt, dive in.
“I feel nothing,” Isabela answers and she gets a quirked brow in return.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. I feel everything for you.”
Her ass is gripped hard enough to bruise, and she’s pulled down, losing control of the narrative as her throat is wide open, begging for a fist around it. Instead, it’s dined on, and Isabela tries to tell herself that she’s satisfied with gentleness. ¨
She has a child and husband playing with it at home and she knows she’s expected to produce at least two more, and yet, she feels nothing for them. She could turn around, leave, and it wouldn’t be her spawn she missed, or the man whose seed is the cause of all this.
But she does not leave.
She does not know how to leave. She knows how to look good in a certain light, she knows how to grow flowers to decorate rooftops and make little children sing, but she doesn’t know how to be her own person. Even when she finds herself in the shadows, she goes home and polishes the dishes until they gleam and glisten and until her hands crack and bleed, repenting on the altar of homemaking, on the altar of family.
Her new pretty pink dress is ripped on the floor, stained with the dirt of the garden where they started, ripped down the back, impossible to repair, thrown to the wayside.
“You feel nothing for me,” she answers, “Because if you felt everything for me, you would not be here. I’m a sea of everything you want, but you’ve stranded yourself on an island. And even though you could dive into the ocean, you know you would never be able to return to the comfort of the shore.”
“I am fragile and unholy,” she manages to rasp through the truth. “Open me. Ravage me. I want to be tormented when you are gone and all I have to look at is my boring husband.”
And God complies.
Isabela knows, when she looks into the Devil’s eyes, they will be green, flanked by batted lashes and a raised brow, bloodshot.