Work Text:
The water runs crimson. It turns clear in short flashes of white, a thin stream of transparent spurts, but not quite clear all the way through. There’s always that angry, violent red that persists and permeates through it, infecting it like a sickness.
Maren watches as the red sticks to the pink tiled walls and the edges of the white tub before it disappears into the drain. It gurgles it down like a grateful, hungry beast. Like her and Lee.
His hair is a pinkish-red beneath the dried blood. An artificial red, not like the depth of the hue that stains their skin and lips and teeth. Lee’s hair is a faded, burning sunset colour that blends in choppily with his dark roots.
Maren lifts a bloodied finger and tangles it in one of the wet curls. He continues cupping his hands in the water and splashing it across his face, shoulders, and chest. The little sea of red in their bathtub sloshes around garishly.
And when Lee looks at her, his skin damp with streaks of their sin dripping down his half-bare body, Maren knows she’s never seen something more beautiful.
He smiles, sly like a fox. “Staring at me, creep?”
She doesn’t respond, only sweeps her own blood-drenched hair to one shoulder and rings it like a towel into the tub. More sticky, metallic-scented red joins the pool they’ve created. It’s easier having their own place where they can take their time washing up at after a feeding and emerge as presentable people. But in certain ways, they’ve had to become even stealthier without the protection of the pitch black trees or a creek to vanish into fresh after a kill.
It’s always a gamble when you’re doing the worst things human beings can do to other human beings and getting away with it.
Lee is sitting on the edge of the tub, bare feet planted in the water. Maren mirrors him and balances her weight on the porcelain edge, bumping her naked shoulder to his.
After a while, Lee reaches over to rotate the faucet. Water comes raining down on them from the shower head, and Maren yelps.
“Lee! I’m still wearing clothes!”
He chuckles and sheds himself of the only piece of clothing he’s wearing—his cut off jean shorts, dirtied and frayed at the hems. Maren lets her own blood-spattered tank top and cotton shorts fall to the floor.
Watching the red swirls dance around the tub floor, swerving around their feet and retreating into the drain is oddly mesmerizing, in a way. The taste of Maren’s high is still lingering in her mouth.
Lee’s hands automatically begin lathering Maren’s favourite lavender-scented shampoo through her hair, the part of their fucked up routine he looks forward to doing the most. He massages it in densely but with a gentle touch, like her father used to do when she was little and he was the one terrified of hurting her instead of the other way around.
Her head tips back and her eyelids flutter closed, focused on the feeling of being brought back down to earth, grounded in their little utopia of carnage. She can tell Lee is smiling even though she isn’t looking at him, sensing a shift in the air at his subtlest movements.
Facing him, she dips her chin forward and kisses her red mouth to his sharp collarbone, licking a trail of hot crimson from his skin, and Lee shivers in her arms. He’s taller than her, but she feels like she’s holding something small and breakable in her palms, like one wrong move will send him slipping down the drain along with the blood.
Deadly things, Maren has learned, can be fragile too.
He lets his head roll forward to capture her mouth with his. The slide of wet flesh and soft skin and hard bone as they softly meld into one being is better than most rushes she gets from feeding; from tearing meat apart with her teeth and swallowing it ravenously.
Because that kind of consumption is always fleeting, satisfying only until the hunger comes back scratching at her door like a wild animal. What she has with Lee settles in her gut, keeping her full and starved for him at the same time. A bewildering alchemy he has over her and she has over him.
Maren sucks his bottom lip into her mouth and gently scrapes her teeth along the plush flesh, pulling it out just a little before letting go. She revels in the soft moan caught in his throat, a sound that’s meant for her and only her.
His hands are firm and slippery on her waist, and she uses the leverage to press his back against the shower wall. Smears of faint red blood mark the tiles around them. If this is how it has to be, gore and the remnants of their guilt aways remaining on the periphery of their love, Maren will take it.
They’re pressed body to body. She can hear his breathing beginning to shift in that way she adores when he’s starting to lose himself. But then he pulls away, wet floppy bangs hanging in front of his half-lidded eyes, and grins.
“You’ve got a little something here,” he says. “Hold on.”
Lee swipes his thumb over a spot near her hair line. The spot of dried blood washes away, leaving her dark curls clean again, like nothing but dirt and oil and the stuff regular people had in their hair after a long day of existing had been there.
She smiles, wide doe eyes that Lee could swim in twinkling back at him. “Thanks.”
They kiss and touch and slip inside one another until the water finally does run clear and their bathtub is shiny and spotless again. That staunch shade of red lives in other places—underneath their nails, in between their molars, down their throats and in their bodies. But right now, they are people together, just like Lee promised her they would be.