Her Missing Part

She always felt like part of her was missing. An ache in her heart, an absence in the air around her—skin wrapped too tight around her bones, blood beating in time with a rhythm unlike her body.

She always felt like something was wrong. Always, until she met them.

The first time was nothing special. Their strong hands fumbling beneath her skirt, tearing her stockings; the hunger in their eyes tempered by furtive glances towards the office door. Her stammered protests, the blank animal fear curling around her mind as they fucked her—

There are many such cases.

The second time, though …

She’d felt unclean for days, scrubbed herself raw, cried until her eyes had nothing left to give. Broken, undone, used up and tossed away—she wanted to die, to curl up and never exist again, to fade into nothingness. Whatever urge brought her back to their office was wholly unlike her, and afterward (long afterward, when she was finally whole) she would conclude that it was not her: that the thing which crawled into her body and filled her with holy anger was some uneasy spirit.

What it was, it roused their ire like nothing else. She yelled, she threatened them; their hands found her throat and her nails found their face, dug deep dripping gashes across them as they squeezed and squeezed, as her struggles finally faded into limp acceptance—

They baptized her in their blood but she didn’t feel it, didn’t notice the too-bright crimson staining her skin with rust; her bulging, dilated eyes saw nothing of what her hands had wrought. They squeezed and squeezed and with every moment she was more surely lost, with every moment she fell deeper into the death they had crafted together—an oblivion of tingling stars, the void eating away at her skin and filling her with such impossible joy, an ecstasy that mere oxygen could never sustain as its absence did—a release, a freedom—!

Her liberation ended too soon.

Their anger faded into revulsion as her life flickered and dimmed; their hands recoiled from the necklace of bruises they’d sealed around her neck. They fell back against their desk, crotch throbbing, stinking of lust and fear, burbling apologies.

Weak and pathetic: even she could see that, as the ocean finally faded from her senses and the world returned to her. So afraid of their own actions, their own desires; so easy to break.

Their second time was truly special.

The way they shied away from her, the tremble in their hands as she closed them around her neck once more—as she coaxed fresh bruises from their strength, as they throbbed and whimpered under her—the emptiness that filled her with a strange new strength as her body fell limp and their orgasm burst inside her like a slug breaking into a cacophony of goo beneath a cruelly placed boot—their hands squeezing, tighter than they wanted, tighter than their mind could stand, stained by blood and sweat and drool, gripping her neck as if it were their last hope for survival, her death their only dream of salvation, an end not offered but cruelly taken from them, her freedom from her body intermingling with their freedom from her—

She didn’t die or she didn’t stay dead, and they would never know the difference.

There was a special tenderness in the moments after, as she admired the ruin they had made of her neck and they struggled to find the certainty which had filled them just an hour before; a certainty that they would never find again, not while she was near, not while they could feel the void curling in her eyes each time those vast grey disks dipped towards them.

Only one certainty ever squirmed in their heart after that: the aching truth that they were hers.