Fuck, I wanted him to bite me. I wanted his teeth to sink into my skin, with his body lying directly on top of mine. Images of me naked, lying on my stomach while Price, naked and bare, lies over my back,flashed through my mind. Would he lick the back of my neck before sinking his teeth into it?
Would his skin match the flames in his eyes, burning me whole with the barest of touch?
I suddenly regretted not seeing Price naked that first night. All I could do was use my imagination, filling his skin with imaginary ink in my mind. It wasn’t good enough, but it was sufficient to cause an issue behind my zipper.
“You want some?” Price ruined my daydreaming, loudly picking through one of the plastic organizers on his desk.
“Some what?” I tried to fight the rush of heat that threatened to spread up my neck, across my cheeks. I peered over his desk, watching as he pulled out a piece of gum. The crappy kind I smelled on his breath earlier.
My heart picked up speed, slamming against my chest as he began to untwist the blue ends, revealing the fake pink color beneath the wrapper. I could smell it even this far away from his desk. “No!”
The sudden yell scared Price so badly, he dropped the gum, wrapper and all onto the floor. “What? What’s wrong?”
I stared at him, wide-eyed and frantic. “Don’t chew that. Please.”
“Uh…”
“Please.” I cursed the whine in my voice internally. “Not around me, at least.”
Price nodded slowly. One by one, each muscle in my body that’d tensed began to relax as he picked up the dropped gum and promptly threw it into the trash.
“Thank you.” In the distant background, I swore I could hear Mom’s voice. It was muffled, and she was singing her favorite Phil Collins hit. The melody faded under my skin, wrapping around my bones, fortifying them if only for a few minutes. “What should I do next?”
My bodyand soul had been in a war for almost my entire life. The intensity came in waves, giving me a few moments of reprieve, though it never lasted for very long.
At around seven years old, I started to itch. Furiously. My parents couldn’t understand that it was bone-deep or that no matter how much I scratched, it wouldn’t go away. I’d scratch until I was bloody, breaking old scabs to create new ones, never able to give my skin a chance to heal.
We thought it might have been seasonal allergies, but my itching was year-round. I went to doctor after doctor, saw an allergy specialist, and got tested for everything under the sun—my only allergy? Cats, of all things.
I was fucking devastated as a kid. Being told I couldn’t snuggle with an animal was the worst thing that had happened to me so far.
If only I knew what would happen later in life. I was prescribed a myriad of different medications to try and curb the need to dig through my skin and crawl out of it. Every night, I’d be slathered with thick creams, swallow a handful of pills, and squirt eye drops into my eyes.
I spent a lot of my childhood wearing gloves and cutting my fingernails down to the nubs. Mom would beg me to stop. Dad would yell at me when I bled through another shirt.
The world was a scary place, I’d found out. Everything terrified me: the dark, loud noises, bugs. There was one thing in particular that scared me the most, and that was social interaction.
Mom homeschooled me right up until I was seven and entering second grade. She had given up, ultimately admitting to Dad that she didn’t have what it took to homeschool her only child. Elementary school was hell for a kid like me.
Thinking back, I could see how obvious it was. The moment myfeet hit the school bus steps, I’d feel a sharp jolt of pain that rattled my skeleton and didn’t end until I got home that evening.
The only relief I could find was to scrape away the top layer of my skin, marring it until I got asked questions about my home life by teachers.
“Are you happy at home, Price?”
“Did your mommy or daddy see those?”
“Do Mommy and Daddy ever fight, sweetheart?”
They didn’t at that time. Mom and Dad were still in love when I was in second grade. Maybe my child instinct knew what was coming and had been preparing my body for it.
After a few years of choosing red sheets to hide the stains and wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover my ugly arms, a doctor finally had an answer for my parents. The hives and feeling of bugs trying to nest inside my bones were symptoms of severe anxiety.
I started medication when I was ten. By that time, I had become so desperate for relief that I started looking for any way to stop the need to scratch. The only thing that quieted my mind, eased my worries, and kept my fingers away from the inside of my arms was cooking.
Mom didn’t mind. Dad was too busy snorting cocaine to particularly care, so I started to spend hours throwing ingredients together. I learned how to operate the entire kitchen by myself, letting my parents think I couldn’t hear them arguing in their bedroom.
The walls were thin.
