One strand is all it takes. Pull at it long enough and even the distance comes apart.
The line of her favorite poem about sucking the juice from her chin. How she peeled the pages in the stanzas of our humid days. Her fingers sticky with our spent.
I have her taste stitched in my mouth, her essence on my tongue, tied when I want to speak. So I write her down. Something to hold the script of us before it goes dark in the dawn.
A wisp of her hair on the passenger seat. Road tripped on unexpected discoveries. I swerve the lines of this prose in a long stretch of raw jealousies. He made the pass. Now she sucks his diction, writhes under his enjambment, his deeper penetration of complex themes. Her legs wrapped around him while he rewrites her with every thrust. I hear the broken moans she never gave me, in their sloppy second drafts.
I brake. We break.
A thread of want remains. My pages frayed. The marks I left on the back of her thighs — a faded narrative of being completely owned. Her subbed exquisite verse. My dominated entendre in the click of the cuffs, encased perfumed metal on her delicate wrists. The scent of his stanzas now sticky on her thighs. The betrayal of sighs that once belonged to me.
Here’s the thing about a thread: tug at it long enough and it doesn’t just come apart — it comes from somewhere. Every loose end loops back. And under his stanzas, under her new verse, under the marks he thinks are his alone, I still find the patterns. That pause before she comes. The word she still spells wrong on purpose because I liked it wrong. He hasn’t rewritten her. He’s writing on top of me. A palimpsest, not an erasure.
She doesn’t know that I know that. She thinks she’s unraveled clean.
She didn’t. She just found someone new to pull the strings.
Thanks Kate Valentine for throwing this Flash Fiction prompt at us. It was an unexpected catharsis.
You were about to get a tongue lashing from me if this didn't come through so well done