Note: I have been contemplating making this story rated M. Please tell me if the current chapters warrent this rating or if you would like me to write more mature romance scenes in the future. I am also still taking song requests.
Song: Losing my Touch by The Rolling Stones
Like a Rolling Stone
Chapter Five: Losing my Touch
Ain't it funny how things happen
Just as we think we've got it all straight
It was his hands that were trembling, not hers.
She has the heart of a child, always falling in and out of love; one comes to expect purple skin and scarlet blood, always losing. Her memories fall away by the days, tattered black and white photographs if anyone had cared enough to capture them, but there is a certain sharpness that cuts with the remembrance of Jack Fonder.
Her bruises bloom yellow—they say there is a rebel boy in town with eyes of the same hue, she thinks she'd like to meet him some day—dandelions in the sun, nothing but weeds that children gather for their mothers to throw away. They overlap with twilight scars, blue and green, tender to the touch so that he presses on them with rough fingers and she tells herself she takes pleasure in this pain.
Because it had been his hands that had trembled, not hers.
Theirs is a stunt of eagerness that nearly takes their lives and still she screams when their souls collide, contrasting black and bumbling gold.
But it was his hands that had trembled, not hers.
Everything seems to be moving forward
But instead we just sit around and wait
She lies, wrapped in sheets that she burns a hole through with the end of her cigarette, sex hanging in the air, at a time when she cannot name the color of the sky. Her mouth still tastes like him. It doesn't bother her much anymore.
Her lips slide across bare skin a cold flesh, across a tattoo in the shape of a crown too black to be studded with rubies, but she can still feel the edges drawing blood from her lips, cool metal and scarlet ichor. She wants this blackness in her veins; she knows it is her only survival.
Seems things are in a lockdown
Nervous looks all around
Everyone is speaking in whispers
No one wants to make a sound
There is always a long silence after fucking—because it is too harsh to be called making love, there are too many wars fought with bullets and without remorse—drawn velvet curtains the color of their insides. They have been folded into each other and it burns the same way sunlight scorches the devil.
She would cry for them, or pray, but she believes in neither tears nor god… at least not any that would save them.
Her eyes glide: vitreous like dirty windowpanes, dusty stained glass high in church skylights, and she runs her hand through her hair because she has nothing else to grab hold to as her world tilts and the air halts in her lungs when Jack stands. He's bare for a moment, and she takes all this time to look, scars and hate exposed fully to her, not wrapped in fabric or buried in her caverns, beneath her skin, clutched between her fingers, corrupting what is already distorted.
"Jack," she whispers, and neither says a word for a moment. Both know how much she keens to say his name, to scream it.
The final ashes of her cigarette stain her fingers black and fall across her chest.
I'm losing my touch, yeah
Losing my touch
Losing my touch baby, way too much
Baby, get me out of here
It should be clear
"Can't you stay?" Ruby asks. Her eyes outline the red ribbons on his back that she had left with her nails, all haste and pent up passion.
The air in the room curls with her insides, sunlight beginning its slow smolder through the day, burning its way past her windowpane. Jack Fonder's muscles tense, "you know I've got things to do, Baby." He balls up the cotton of his t-shirt in his fist, using the other hand to open the door. It sounds harsh in this room, the turn of the handle, like leaving something behind.
Keep an eye on your front door, baby
I'll be slipping in round the back
I just need a little, a little cab fare
And then I'll let you hit the sack
Steve is downstairs, hands clenched, face warped and twisted and so angry. Angry for reasons Ruby doesn't know, some things she will never understand. She is too fragile for such emotion, her body too thin, skin like china-wear, glass. She shakes only with lust and lost life, sins of love.
She doesn't blush when Steve's eyes rove over the claw marks on the back of Jack's skin, etched with sharp nails, or her bruises, pressed into her skin by fervor. And when Jack kisses her hard, slipping his hand into her back pocket and leaving a dollar bill there like a petal-less flower to grow by his touch, and groping at her through her shirt, yes, even then, she does not blush.
"What," Steve says, "you gotta pay for a good score now, Jack?" Steve is coiled for a brawl, tight muscles and eyes like fire. He's a greaser kid who never did learn how to stay away from a fight, junkyard dogs that die by another's fangs.
"Oh, Stevie," Ruby sighs. Jack just smirks, sharp teeth and narrow eyes; he likes to watch people self-destruct, the same inferno he'll burn in some day.
Ruby stumbles when two bodies barrel past her and through another open door, always away, harsh, and never with the time to contemplate. Fists make purple skin and black eyes, crimson blood to sign your name in. It doesn't hurt at first, that doesn't come until later. Adrenaline rushes, a pure drug through their veins, nerve endings snapping, never growing back; and yet, they still feel too much.
Jack's body breaks through the porch railing, splintered wood and bones, Steve's hands pulling at his jaw, crashing against solid steel and rock. These are the things they are made of: fears, and lies, and all things unreal, crude open wounds and bleeding hearts, cleaving rock like an avalanche. They will all come crashing down.
Steve's head meets pavement, a bloody kiss to stain in red lipstick years later in the memory of violence. It comes with a sound that echoes like fireworks and words said in empty rooms, gut clenching, wrenching, up heaving. Something about their insides shifts.
This is the sort of scuffle that burns bright and fast, like a tornado that touches down for only a few moments, seconds that thrum with the heart, and yet still long enough to tear apart a town, miles of destruction. It happens when one doesn't care enough about what he's fighting for, only the feel of fists on flesh and the numbness of a medicine that pumps without needles. It is a sickness that cannot be cured by its prescription pill, white, joint pains, round, bloodshot eyes.
Jack stands on heavy feet for a moment, surly and mean, lopsided in his footing. He turns around and salutes them before turning the corner of the street, bumping shoulders with another hood boy along the way. Steve stands swiftly, shifting eyes, a headache that will not soon pass, watching him go.
Ruby waves, feeling as though her hand will be snatched from the sky, broken fingers like birds' wings, unable to fly.
'Cause I'm losing my touch
Losing my touch
Yes I'm losing my touch way too much
Baby, get me out of here
It should be clear, yes
The kitchen feels cool, the compression of air after a fierce storm. The water burns, red hands to match the shade of blood that has risen to the surface of their lives for them to flounder and drown within. The rag in Ruby's hands is threadbare, thin as the metal they use to protect themselves with, and it will tinge harshly with the color seeping from the back of her brother's head.
"Why do you do this to yourself, Ruby?" Steve asks, fingers skimming over the trail of blood at the back of his neck, catching it like one does water in their hands, only for a moment and then not at all.
Ruby stands, the soaked cloth in her hands, dripping a puddle on the floor. She has brought the storm inside with them. "Do what?" she asks, wringing out the cloth, the water gushing, falling at her feet, and she is mindless to it all.
He takes up her arm in his hand, the water spindling on her wrists and clinging to her skin, discolored and damaged, and curses beneath his breath.
She smiles, serenely, as one would in the dark. "We love each other."
"Damn it!" Steve slams his palm down upon the counter, but he, rather than Ruby, is the one to shudder at his outburst or, perhaps, because of it. "What about this is," he pauses, as though such a soft word is not able to pass his unforgiving lips, "…love?" It sounds angry and harsh, all oposition of the word's definition.
"Oh, you know, Stevie. Sometimes when you're with a girl things just get rough." She reaches around his head, a cage of ideas, enrapturing, and presses the dull cloth to his wound.
"Not like this." He shakes his head, the cloth tearing at his skin where his sister has pressed too hard. But she had such gentle hands; maybe they are all just falling apart.
"I'm just one of those girls that likes it like that." Her nose scrunches up and she giggles as though she's talking to one of her girlfriend's beneath the comforter of her bed by lamplight, when intentions are slow and words come too fast. Her feet shuffle, the water vibrating with her psyche.
"Clean this goddamn mess up," Steve tells her, face twisted.
I ain't going to keep it long, baby
But just long, long enough
I've got to pick up my passports
And I've got to get my stuff
The sun rises high as they fall lower, blue sky and no cloud. The clock marks away minutes that they will never get back, that they never even notice have passed. Ruby's mouth makes the shape of an O like omissive or outrageous or oblivious. "You should be going on to the drag now," she tells Steve.
"Yeah," he gathers himself, car keys with jagged teeth, and a grease rag in his back pocket. "I'm meeting Soda." She watches him go, the collar of his shirt stained with his own ferocity. She's not sure she'll be able to wash it out later.
'Cause I'm losing my touch
Just losing my touch, baby, baby, baby
I'm losing my touch way, way too much
Baby, get me out of here
Well it must be clear
She is a doll with cracks in her porcelain skin that cut her insides each time it shifts. She spreads false pigments across her face and it is as though she is replacing herself, mascara smudges at the corners of her eyes, and little bracelet bruises. She wears bright red lipstick, staining her entire essence, to match the swollen parts where he bit her lips.
She is fragile, infallible, warped by other's hands, but still untouchable. She dresses in lace, ties ribbons on her ribs, and lets those caged birds sing behind that prison of calcium bones, wings fluttering at the same rate of her heart. Lastly, she hides the broken missing pieces of herself in the drawer of her desk and pretends that she is whole.
Losing my touch
Yes I'm losing my touch
Yes I'm losing my touch way too much
Baby get me out of here