by Mikayla Mislak
She stood above me, always above, always in control. Her dark eyes glimmered. Her hair was dyed the color of blood. She reached down between my legs and dug her nails deep into my thighs, not fast, but painfully slow, deliberate. My face twisted away, but my body stood still. I was her property, and she never let me forget it.
“You’re prettiest when in pain.”
I opened my eyes and looked at the woman that I did not and would never love. I realize now that it was a mistake to approach her that night.
On a small dance floor, pooled in sunset yellow, surrounded with soft drinks and literature, I zipped through the room, clinging to the partygoers like static. I was alive. More than alive, I was reborn. I was a siren of the night, luring men and women onto the dance floor. I was liberal with my caresses, my compliments, and my kisses. More than with the people themselves, I flirted with their boundaries. What twist of hip, what tone of laugh did I have to do to make them drop their guard? What did I have to do to make them succumb to the will of the beat? With my body that I stretched and swirled, I reached into the dark corners of the punch bowl to fish out the shy creatures.
I was not the hero of the dance floor, no, I was the predator. I brought the strangers together so I could lose myself in the web of their collective presence. Tonight was about getting lost. I wanted to forget the weeks of isolation that my heart condition had brought me. This night was not about this pain, it was about the coming together of outsiders, to make brief, brilliant connections with the Technicolor souls.
Just then, I found another two loners, standing far from the circle of the dance floor. My body was drawn to the shorter of the two, with crimson hair and dark eyes. I moved to her, lured by a red thread of fate. I tempted her with a dance and she did not refuse me. In my arms, I could feel her heat, bleeding into me, infecting my lifeblood. I pressed my lips to her neck, searching for the source of her power. For a moment, she did the same, intoxicated by the same dark energy that crisscrossed between us. But she paused, broke away. “I can’t. I have a girlfriend,” she said, indicating the girl standing next to her. I melted away into the fold of dance floor, biting back the shame.
“We need to break up,” I said, looking up at the girl that I wanted so badly last year, a girl that eventually came to me. But I took a step too far into the darkness of her eyes, and now I had to save myself before she drowned me.