She couldn't work out what they reminded her of.
Flowers, perhaps; a bed of blooming flowers with slightly discoloured petals, lumpy and rather misshapen, strewn almost haphazardly across crumbly soil. Or maybe it was a cloudy sky, in the late evening, with burnt colours streaking behind dark smudges as far as the eye could see. Or was it a craggy face of cliff, rough and broken around the edges, that remained strong and motionless as rocks crashed down it, cold and destructive and unstoppable?
She didn't think it was any of those.
She saw beauty in all of those things, and if there was one thing she was certain of in the maelstrom of indecipherable thoughts and feelings that clouded her mind - and, it would now seem, her pathetic judgement - it was that there was no beauty in them. And she was not going to pretend for a second there was. Clara had spent enough of her life pretending to herself, to everyone else, hiding things and ignoring them and making vain attempts to smother her ever-present fear.
He never used to be this way. He was clumsy and shy and slightly awkward, always fumbling over things and shooting her quick, lopsided smiles, never managing to hold eye contact with her for longer than a few seconds before glancing away and fiddling with his hands. His shyness was one of the very first things Clara found so compelling. She wanted to know all about him, she wanted him to put his trust in her and she wanted to watch him unravel and unfurl as if falling apart, not to break, but to share everything about him with her. He was handsome, there was no doubt about that, with his floppy dark hair and his enigmatic green eyes, which seemed too old for his mere thirty years, but she wanted to actually know him.
As it happened, the only thing that fell apart in the end was her. And she most definitely broke.
He was gone, by this point in the morning. It was still early, but he had a habit of leaving early nowadays, and she wasn't about to change that. The sunlight streaming in through the curtains and the fuzzy red numbers on her alarm clock told her that she really needed to get up, otherwise she'd be late for work and get in trouble and then he would find out and then God knows what he'd do to her, but he would be angry, and demand answers she didn't have, and then it would start all over again. Not that it ever really stopped.
Gently rubbing her heavy eyelids, Clara propped herself up on her elbows, and a low hiss escaped from between her lips as twinges of pain ran through her body. She was aching all over, and she was terrified she was showing marks in places she wouldn't be able to cover. As she struggled to sit upright, drawing her legs close to her body, she lightly ran her index finger down the side of her face and neck. She couldn't feel anything obvious there, but she'd have to check in the mirror when she finally made herself look. She didn't think there would be, though. He was too clever for that.
She hated the mirror. He'd bought it for her when she moved in, a good four years ago now, and it was a beautiful thing - a full length, stand-alone mirror, framed with intricate silver carvings that curled around its edges. She used to polish its surface every weekend, to prevent dust and grime collecting on it, and the image she saw reflected back would be sharp and real and beautiful. When it started, she refused to clean it for weeks, and the image started to blur around the edges. She liked it better that way.
She tossed the crumpled covers off of her, taking care not to look at any part of herself as she did so. She'd let herself look for too long already this morning. Slowly, with great care, she eased herself off the bed, screwing her eyes tightly shut against the pain, before padding across the room to the mirror.
Somehow, even now, she always managed to feel shocked every time she saw the dark contusions littering her pale skin. They were so bold and contrasting and ever-present that she felt, as she always did for one overwhelming moment, that she would never be free of them.
They weren't that bad, today. The bruises along her left upper arm, that creeped down into the crook of her elbow, were the worst - but those were the ones she had been looking at earlier, so she'd had time to get a little more used to them. She gently shrugged her arms out of the thin straps of the short cotton nightgown she was wearing, the one he liked her in, and let it slide to the floor, watching helplessly as they all emerged from behind the thin fabric. The ones from her upper arm continued up, too - they curved around her shoulder and down, across her chest, and down her side until her hip. Clara ran her cold fingers softly over the purple, mottled skin, and the tender swellings ached under her touch. There were a few new marks on top of the yellowing skin on the outsides of her thighs, just under her hips, from where he'd grasped her legs tightly and didn't even bother asking the question. It wouldn't have mattered if he had. She wouldn't have been able to say no.
Her thoughts were suddenly catapulted back to a different time, one she found she was coming back to more and more recently. It was dangerous, she knew, but like an addict in search of their next fix, she couldn't help herself.
She remembered their first time - he had taken her out for dinner, and he had ordered fish fingers. It was a very, very fancy restaurant, only a few weeks old, and yet he didn't seem ashamed of his odd choice - or even, it seemed, believe it was odd at all. It was their second date. (He'd taken her out bowling the first time - it was cliché, she knew, but she'd loved it. He was extremely competitive, she noticed, and it took all of her strength to refrain from smirking every time his features twisted with concentration, his tongue slipping out the corner of his mouth. He had been in such a hurry to start the game, such a hurry to impress her, that he misspelled his name on the board, and she couldn't help but laugh a little whenever "Juhn" popped up on the flickering screen: not because it was particularly funny, but because he didn't notice even once, not for the whole evening.) He ordered his dessert halfway through his meal, and Clara had sat there, astonished, as he surreptitiously dipped his last two fish fingers into the custard of his pudding, and ate them. He looked up at her, his knowing green eyes suddenly wide and innocent, with a dribble of custard making its way down his chin and onto his deep blue tie, and all of a sudden she felt huge surge of love, followed by a burning desire, a desperate need, to be physically close to him, to have all of him right there with all of her. She couldn't get him home quick enough.
She remembered how he led her upstairs, his fingers locked with hers and his thumb gently caressing her knuckles, placing his hand on the small of her back as they crossed the threshold; how he placed fervent kisses along her jawbone and down her neck, along her collarbone, stopping before he reached her breasts; his hands tracing circles on her thighs and holding her around her waist; her slim fingers deftly undoing his tie as he fumbled to get her out of her red dress; then, afterwards, feeling him smile against her lips as she lay down next to him, exhausted yet so very content, gathered into his arms and filled completely with a happiness so pure she hadn't thought it could even exist.
Tears begun sliding down her cheeks before she had a chance to comprehend her loss. He never used to be this way. Clara was sure. She kept repeating it to herself, again and again and again as she started going through her daily rituals: ointment, cream, oil, primer, foundation, concealer, long sleeves, thick tights, loose jumpers. He paid for all her creams, all her makeup. She used so much of the stuff, and every fortnight or so she would return home to find shiny new bottles sitting quietly on the countertop. He never said a word about it, and she never asked.
He never used to be this way. Is anyone born a bad person? Is there even such thing? Clara had no answers. Nobody really did. He was so kind when they'd met, so loving and shy and always doing whatever he could to please anyone he could. And then one day...
She froze, and squeezed her eyes shut, tugging a cardigan over her spotty dress. It didn't bear thinking about. She was late, she had so much to do, and she knew if she went down that path she wouldn't come back. Not for a very long time.
Instead, she glanced into the mirror one last time, practiced smiling a few times and making sure every one reached her eyes, then turned her back and walked quickly away, the door clicking quietly shut behind her.