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Wednesday looks at Tyler's back and vertebrae, small buttons hatching his body in half: cut here, they seem to suggest. Cut here to open this boy apart and see what's hidden inside.
A monster, she thinks.
Wednesday listens. She listens to Tyler's breath that sounds like a slow dance. There is blood on his lips, indelible. The lives Tyler has taken are sewn to his bones in the most brutal way – with guilt.
Cut here. Wednesday raises her forefinger as if it were a scissor. If she tore his back, hate and fear and tenderness would spill from his shoulder blades. A cloud of carnivorous moths gone mad.
How can a body be so full, Wednesday wonders. How can a body be so dangerous, agonizing, and vulnerable.
Wednesday has never understood what to do with her hands, or where to put them. Wednesday only knows how to torture. Not caresses, but cuts. And yet–
And yet–
And yet, now she looks at Tyler and thinks she would like to give him something light. She would like fireflies to pour from her fingers. She wants to create a bridge between her, him, and the monster within them both. She wants to connect, understand, and hold.
Wednesday hesitates. She should be afraid. She should be afraid to sleep with someone who tried to kill her. He should be afraid of her as well, for the same reason. They are both there, though. Defenseless. Cold. Warm. Tyler is asleep and it's like he's telling her: you can do whatever you want with me. I'd let you do it. I'd let you slit my throat, gouge out my eyes, stab me again and again and again. And how wonderful it is, Wednesday thinks, that feeling of power. And how terrifying it is, that feeling of hunger. She wants his body. She wants to touch his body. She wants to press her face into the hollow of Tyler's neck and breathe, she wants to rest her ear on his chest and listen, listen to the distorted and hostile rhythm of his heart.
She would feel the hatred, between its beats. She would hear all the screams he had to swallow in silence. She would hear how the sea screams when you try to stuff it in a jar. She would hear the cries of someone buried underground, unable to get out.
Tyler is salty. It's as if traces of tears were left on him, beneath his skin. Tyler tastes like iron as well. He tastes the same as bullets do when they penetrate inside flesh, leaving holes. And from those holes, flows away all the life that those bodies, now corpses, have failed to hold. From those holes, the most macabre and true desires spill around without control.
Wednesday would like to
shrink
slip inside his palms
and discover the true colors of his ribs
or how rotten they are
or how much fear can be kept between two shoulders.
They both thought they were so strong, indestructible. Hatred, revenge, resentment, loneliness. Those things should have turned their skin into steel. Except that they did not. Wednesday has found out that humans are fragile, all of them. They shatter with a breath, everything they need is a hint of rejection, of truth. Humans desire, so they expose themselves, and so they break.
Wednesday presses the tip of her forefinger against Tyler's neck. He is warm. And how beautiful it is, she thinks, mad at herself, to touch someone's skin. How beautiful and twisted it is, she thinks, livid at herself, to crave intimacy. Intimacy between bodies.
Tyler has lied to her. But at the same time, he only showed her who he really was. Tyler can do the sweetest things, things that taste like rain, like when you open your hands wide under the abundant sun. Tyler also burns with resentment due to what was done to his mother. He did terrible things. But those things don't make him a terrible person. That is why they understand each other. Because they are similar. Wrong but not entirely, bad but solely under certain lights.
When Wednesday looks at Tyler, she sees war. She hears the screams. She smells the fire. The desperation, the ferocity, the fatality of sharp and rusting blades. There is war between him and her. There is war between him and the world. There is war between him and himself. Inside him, there is something deeply torn apart, and attacking is the only way he knows to pursue a semblance, an illusion, of relief. Tyler is lacerated. And that wound, perpetually open, fascinates her. She wants to dive her arms into it. She wants to spread it and then stitch it up. She wants to grasp bare flesh, blood, and pain. She wants to sink and touch every single hue and contradiction of his soul. She wants to eat him alive. And she wants to tell him that no matter how fast he runs, he will never get rid of his past. He must learn to live with it, or commit suicide.
Wednesday quietly runs her finger along his spine and imagines digging furrows, leaving ink in his bones like poison. Tyler is not a good person. Nevertheless, Tyler cannot be reduced to the person animated by the murderous madness into which he has been transformed. Tyler has always harbored hatred inside. But he has also been drugged and manipulated so that his hatred would grow in the most obsessive, merciless and cruel way.
Tyler was whole, then something too big and hungry came abruptly and bit off pieces of his soul. Now he has to learn how to rebuild himself from all those holes and shreds. And he's trying without any lifeboat, just with the sound of his father's gun splitting his head. This is why Wednesday cannot condemn him. This is also why she knows what to do with her hands, sometimes. And where to put them. And what she wants to touch. And how she wants to touch it.
Monster, boy. Wednesday wants both.
So she hugs him tightly.