Lovers entwined, their bodies twisted together in a way which practically screamed how long they’d known each other’s form, how often they’d lain together. She watched them in jaw-dropped silence for a moment. Or was it minutes? Her heart shattered, a whispered, “no”, caressed her lips as it slipped away; nearly as silent as the tears that streamed down her ruddy cheeks while they slowly blanched. By some god-forsaken miracle the lovers before her heard that ‘no’ and spun towards her. Their partially clothed bodies felt even more intimate than the last time she herself had slept with that man.

“Honey,” his own whispered plea ricocheted within her mind.

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Her grey eyes drift aimlessly around the room, landing here, there, anywhere other than on the woman sitting so sternly before her. Fingers twist into the ragged band of her worn shirt as she fidgets endlessly under the strict woman’s glare. Stare? The other woman’s voice is like a bee, hovering at the entrance to her ear and begging for her attention. Or more likely demanding it. She can’t focus on it either way. Her eyes jolt as the woman’s soft, incessant tone takes on a hard bite which settles itself between her shoulder blades. Schooling her body into some semblance of control she trains her eyes on the other woman with a sheepish smile.

“Can you repeat that?” Her own voice comes out dripping with honey and glazed with inattentiveness. As if she could really care, particles floating through her blood stream, those broken bits of the pills she swallowed hastily less than an hour ago are trying to put her back together, though they make it so hard to focus.... She giggles at the thought of them there beneath her skin and her face twitches.

“Juliet, do you remember what happened the last time you saw your husband?” asks that bee, buzzing so closely again. Her shoulders twitch incessantly at the questions and the images that bounce before her eyes before flitting away again.

“He died,” her heart rate hitches up a notch at the words, they’d told her as much. She gives nothing away by repeating their own words back to them. Her chest constricts with anxiety, they want her back where she’d been broken. Where she’d shattered.

Those calming grey walls push in on her out of the corners of her vision, they draw her eyes again and again. So far from the bright yellows, deep blues, chocolates, of her home, she’d be lucky if she ever saw such colors again. Muscles along her jaw spasm with the need to shout her pain and let them know what the ‘love’ of her life had done to her. What she’d done to him in return...but if she did she knew they’d put her in a much worse place than here and so she smiled sweetly over the raging of her emotions.

“They say there was a lot of blood,”

Behind her eyes she strokes the memories, coaxing them forward. Can’t tell, won’t tell, but she recalls every moment, and treasures each of them: the spray of his blood as it arched from his neck to coat her body, the scream that ripped from the other woman’s throat, that final image of those two whores wrapped together in the sheets of her bed. Since she’d found them that imagery was the only aphrodisiac she needed. He’d ended her...she’d only returned the favor.

Chapped with continual chewing, her lips pressed together to hold in the wicked smile which shuddered below the surface. The grey of her eyes flashes, so close in color to the walls, but there is a brightness to her gaze which the walls cannot mirror. Her hands play absently with the blood pooling in her lap.