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What meaning is there to the word ‘love’ if the one saying it does not mean it?
What meaning could there possibly be to the tenderness of hand holding, to the small gestures of company and of touch, when the one receiving it did not truly believe in it?
It was a rot. A sweet, perfumed rot that festered beneath his torso and towards his lips, blooming like a bruise and it disgusted him.
It disgusted him, so, so much.
This pantomime of devotion was a scream trapped behind his teeth, a blunt and rusted nail hammered into the plaster of his heart by a hand that knew nothing of building, only of breaking. A clumsy, relentless violence. Digging. Digging. Digging. Until the small, neat hole meant to hold a precious weight gaped wide—a ragged maw, an ugly and useless wound. Too ravaged to hold a memory. Too ruined to be anything but a monument to its own making.
Pure Vanilla could not love him. How possibly could he? The sun does not love the cracks it creates in the desert floor. He was that fissure. That flaw. Every supposedly gentle word spoken from those intoxicating, putridly “pure” lips was another blow of the hammer, another spiderweb of cracks spreading through the plaster, until he felt the whole fragile facade of him would give way and reveal the hollow, howling emptiness within. He was that emptiness. Digging his finger through the wall only revealed disappointment. A mere void not capable of loving, nor capable of being loved, yet wishing, even if it was just for a mere millisecond, to be looked at by someone. A hypocrite out of his shell, a loathsome pitiful worm at heart.
Shadow Milk felt the lie in the precise temperature of Pure Vanilla’s skin. A scripture of touch written in the language of duty. His own hands in that grasp were dead things, cold and twisted and stiff, screaming to clench, to feel the bright, honest rip of his own dark nails in his palm. But he left them there, limp. To pull away was to be alone with the stark, silent truths of his own unlovability.
So he offered up his own splintering heart-wood. He would be the eyesore. The perfect ruin for this beautiful, devastating lie.
And then Pure Vanilla kissed him.
His spine was a bowstring, drawn tightly. His neck, a sacrifice bared not befitting for an altar, but for the teeth of a god he wanted to devour him whole and longed for him, in response, to tear him into pieces.
The kiss was not quite a settlement between them. No, never that. It was an invasion—a breath of warm, clean air that he wanted to foul with his own decay. It tasted of nothing, and he hated it. He wanted it to taste of sweat and salt and sin. So he did not just let it be. He devoured it. He bit at the emptiness, trying to crack the sanctity and suck out some kernel of real, filthy desire. He swallowed the nothingness until it choked him. He wanted to be consumed by a hunger that did not exist.
He was a gaping mouth, a desperate vessel. His lips were starving, moving against the lukewarm tide with a frantic, animal need to get in, to find the heat source, to taste the man under the saint. Inside, the silent screaming curdled into a guttural, wet sound in the base of his throat. His hands stayed at his sides, but his fingers were claws digging into his own thighs, drawing half-moons of sharp, honest pain through the fabric. He would hold Pure Vanilla until he cracked him open.
He needed more.
This gentle pressure was a mockery. This careful, sanitized touch was a starvation diet served at a feast. He needed the gnash of teeth, the burn of a grip that would leave five-pointed constellations of bruise on his hip. He needed the saint’s perfect composure to shatter into a million glittering, ugly pieces around them.
And more.
He needed the clean, vanilla scent to be suffocated by the salt-sting of sweat. He needed to be pressed into the earth until soil packed under his nails and the sacred shroud was torn aside. He needed a groan that was ripped from a throat, not offered from a pulpit. He needed proof—physical, undeniable, messy proof—that he could grind the pristine into filth, drag it clawing down among the soiled, until it is left with nothing but his own body as offering.
And more and more and more.
His mind was a broken record of want, a singular, throbbing note of need. More pressure, more skin, more noise. More of the body, less of the soul. He wanted to be filled with it, until the hollowed-out cavity of him was packed so tight with the physical fact of Pure Vanilla that there was no room for the lie. He wanted to be devoured in turn, to be taken apart not with tenderness, but with a hunger that mirrored his own terrifying void. He needed it to mean something so visceral that it could not be faked. He needed to be ruined by it, so that the ruin itself would become the only truth that mattered.
Pure Vanilla’s hand cradled his jaw—a saint anointing a feral dog. The thumb stroked his cheekbone and the touch was a brand. His other arm was a shackle of muscle and intent, sliding around his waist and pulling their bodies together in a crush that was no longer a mantle, but a cage. Hips ground against hips, a full-bodied enshrinement that was all friction and no fire, a perfect, torturous simulation of rapture.
He could feel the steady, untroubled beat of Pure Vanilla’s heart against his own frantic, rabbit-thumping pulse. The obscenity of the contrast made his skin prickle with a sick sweat. He wanted to bite the lip that offered such bloodless sacrament until he tasted copper and prayer. He wanted to sink his teeth into the column of that pure throat and suck, to force the saint to prove he had anything but holy water in his veins.
But he didn't. He let his head be wrenched back. He let his body be used as a prop in this divine pantomime. He let himself be the ruined temple where the god came only to piss on the altar. The kiss was the final nail, and he was the hammer, driving it deeper into his own gaping hole.
When Pure Vanilla pulled away, a string of spit connected their mouths—a glistening, vulgar tether.
The strand of spit snapped, and with it the illusion.
Pure Vanilla’s eyes were calm, unbearably calm. They looked upon him not with love, nor lust, nor even hatred, but with that sainted pity he loathed above all else. That softness which stripped him bare, left him raw and writhing in the silence between heartbeats.
Shadow Milk’s chest heaved. He wanted to scream. He wanted to claw the pity out of those eyes until they wept red, until the saint’s composure cracked and spilled something real. But his throat locked around the sound, sealing it inside like every other truth he had swallowed.
He realized, then, that he had given himself entirely to a lie. His mouth still burned with the ghost of a kiss that meant nothing, that tasted of emptiness. And yet his body trembled as though it had been branded by fire.
The worst part was not the falseness of it all. The worst part was that some small, festering shard of him wanted—desperately, pathetically—for it to be true.
The “saint” stepped back, hand falling from his jaw. The absence was colder than any grip could have been.
Shadow Milk did not move. He stood like the ruin he was. The rot inside him throbbed, flowering wider, crack by crack within that wall, eating deeper with each second.
When Pure Vanilla finally spoke, his words were gentle, unbearably gentle.
And Shadow Milk laughed. A low, broken sound, more sob than mirth.
For what meaning could there be in love, when spoken by lips that did not mean it?