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“you think you are possessing me—but i've got my teeth in you.”
angela carter
“Well,” she begins, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”
Ryujin feels like she should believe it. Why shouldn’t she, when she’s easily distracted by Chaeryeong’s bare legs tangled with her own, the way she stretches out and takes up more space than she should? She knows Ryujin wouldn’t complain, that Ryujin would let Chaeryeong do whatever she wanted if she asked. “That’s sweet of you to say.” Ryujin feels her lip curling up on one end as she replies.
“I’m being serious.”
“I am too.”
Chaeryeong leans close, pushing Ryujin’s shoulder lightly, shifting closer. Ryujin scans her face, eyes going from her soft mouth to her bright eyes, then back, before eyeing the almost finished ice cream in her hands. It’s down to the cone now, Ryujin’s favorite part. When she snaps her eyes back to meet Chaeryeong’s gaze, she’s suddenly starving. “I’m being serious and genuine. There’s nothing wrong with you, the doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
How can she be so sure? A woman with a strange heartbeat and random spikes of unending, all-capturing hunger when she looks at—
“And besides, since when have I been wrong about you?” Chaeryeong raises her eyebrows in question, and a moment passes between them, the air filled with something Ryujin couldn’t name before she softly laughs. Chaeryeong wiggles her eyebrows in response, leaning closer as Ryujin looks down, where they have intertwined their hands. (Same nail color and everything, Chaeryeong liked to match.) “I know you, don’t I?”
Ryujin hums at that, rubbing her thumb gently across Chaeryeong’s knuckles. “Just like I know you, right?”
Chaeryeong huffs, going quiet. Ryujin lifts her eyes, sees the way Chaeryeong’s gaze is fierce but also soft. She whispers, “better than anybody in the entire world.”
Then she offers the rest of the vanilla cone to Ryujin. Chaeryeong doesn’t let go, just holds it up to her mouth and mimics taking a bite. Ryujin is suddenly struck with that deep sense of hunger once more.
Ryujin takes a bite and imagines it's Chaeryeong’s skin between her teeth.
x.
Everything is sticky, humid, and hot; all that Ryujin can think about is how pretty Chaeryeong looks in this sunlight. She looks at the other girl from where she floats in the pool, Chaeryeong’s hair hanging over the edge into the water, and wants to reach and touch it. It’s grown long again, a little frizzy now. Chaeryeong can’t decide if she wants to dye it. Ryujin likes her natural hair color, the same way she likes everything about Chaeryeong.
Usually, she wouldn’t stare this much. But these days, Ryujin can’t help but feel like she has to savor every moment. She’s nervous, almost, to think about what could happen next, but there is a comfort that she finds in Chaeryeong’s skin. She finds it in her eyes, her hair, and her laugh.
“You’re staring at me,” Chaeryeong breathes out; there is a soft breeze that comes through, and it feels like her voice.
”I can’t?” Ryujin wonders, her fingers moving close to where Chaeryeong’s hair rests in the water. “You’re being quiet,” she tells her after a moment, “That’s not like you.” Chaeryeong lets out an amused breath, and Ryujin watches her face, waiting for her to open her eyes. She doesn’t; Ryujin’s fingers brush through the ends of her hair, suddenly longing to press her lips to Chaeryeong’s palm. “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
The silence that follows is longer. Ryujin sometimes wishes she could pry open Chaeryeong’s mind. She would pick apart everything, each word at a time, until she fully understood everything about the other. She sinks lower, until her nose is barely above the water, and for a moment, she feels like a predator ready to strike, eyes following the way Chaeryeong’s chest rises and falls with every breath she takes.
Ryujin thinks about what Chaeryeong told her the other day. “Karina doesn’t know you like I know you,” Chaeryeong had whispered, looking up past her eyelashes to study Ryujin. “She doesn’t know your heart like I do.” Her voice then was a mix of plea and command, and she kept brushing her lips against Ryujin’s as Ryujin held her away at just the right distance. Ryujin hadn’t been able to stop smiling, drunk on alcohol and something else entirely, maybe power. Then Ryujin kissed her deeply, then pressed Chaeryeong’s hand to her chest so she could feel the pounding of Ryujin’s strange heart, almost fighting against her body.
Chaeryeong wants to know everything in Ryujin’s heart, but Ryujin thinks she shouldn’t think too hard about it. Ryujin was sure that whatever was inside both of them was the same. How could Chaeryeong not see that?
She pulls her hand back towards her, thinking about swimming another lap, when Chaeryeong sits up. Ryujin doesn’t process it quickly, the way Chaeryeong turns her body around and slides into the pool. She’s close, and her eyes are bright with something Ryujin can’t place. “Scream with me.” The way Chaeryeong says it, Ryujin knows it’s not a question. Even if it was, Ryujin would’ve said yes.
Ryujin never opens her eyes in swimming pools because her eyes always burn. But as she sank deeper into the freezing water, she considered opening them. She doesn’t know why, the feeling was so strong, so suffocating. So she does. Chaeryeong is looking right back at her.
And they scream.
x.
Ryujin’s therapist probably thinks she’s a freak. Maybe she’s right, Ryujin thinks as she bites her nail. The waiting room is almost empty, besides her and the receptionist behind the desk (the one who didn’t care if Ryujin lived or died).
She longed to check her phone, to read Chaeryeong’s message again. “Aren’t you hungry?” she wrote. “Let me feed your empty heart.” A few weeks ago, her therapist, an older woman who didn’t give a shit about being polite or tiptoeing around any topic with Ryujin, asked her: “When have you felt the most attracted to another human being?”
Ryujin can’t forget the way her blood rushed, the way she bounced her knee from restlessness as the memory came.
Chaeryeong, with her mascara ruined and lip gloss smudged, gripping red jelly. The lighting was so dark, red, and the stains on Chaeryeong’s hands looked like blood. She had stared at Ryujin that entire night, she remembered, furious with how Karina had stuck with her the entire night. (No matter how much Chaeryeong tried to hide that venom, Ryujin always knew.) She cornered Ryujin in her room, sat in her lap as Ryujin used her elbows to sit up.
She stared at Ryujin, eyes bright, hot on Ryujin’s skin as she said, “This is your heart. Do you understand?”
Ryujin only nodded, eyes fluttering. Chaeryeong smiles at her, soft and excited. Then she takes a bite, never breaking eye contact. Ryujin swallowed, leaning up close. “It’s mine. And I’ll take everything.”
Ryujin licks her lips, nods again. Chaeryeong’s eyes jump from Ryujin’s own down to her lips, down to her neck, and back up again. She presses the dessert against Ryujin’s mouth. “This is my heart, you understand?” And at that moment, the entire world was the two of them.
Chaeryeong mimics taking a bite. Ryujin follows her lead. That was the first night Ryujin had kissed Chaeryeong, the first night she knew that she was completely weak to Chaeryeong’s touch if it came down to it.
That was the most she’s ever felt her heart beat in a rhythm that was “normal.” It felt too fast for her, back then, and she couldn’t forget how dizzy she became before she passed out in Chaeryeong’s bed. (When she woke up, she was the hungriest she had ever been in her entire life.)
x.
“Your ribs are pretty.”
Ryujin gives an amused huff at that, crossing her arms as Chaeryeong presses into her side. “You think so?”
Chaeryeong nods at Ryujin, gaze sly and mischievous. She then taps her nail against the X-ray, over the heart, moving in close as though she’s about to let Ryujin in on a big secret. “Can I have it?”
Ryujin licks her lips, tilting her head. “Hmm,” she hums, eyes scanning the other. “Not yet.”
Chaeryeong pouts. “How about as a gift? I’d be the happiest woman in the world.”
“Maybe. If I think you deserve it.”
x.
“I think I’m a bit of a cannibal.”
She is very aware that it’s a bizarre statement, off-putting even. Possibly a bit terrifying if you didn’t know who she is. She would have never said it in a room of strangers, would’ve just typed the thought away in her journaling app before forgetting about it. Or maybe she’d bring it up in therapy, wondering out loud if she should call it some strange sex thing while her therapist wrote down every word Ryujin said.
But she’s not in a room with strangers or her therapist. She’s sitting on the edge of a bed that’s not her own, one leg crossed over the other, stomach growling. Her nails tap against the plastic case of her phone, an old habit from anxiousness, as the screen lights up with a message.
lia: where are you guys???
“You say some weird fucking shit sometimes,” Ryujin glances up, the message already fading from her memory. Chaeryeong is fixing her makeup in the mirror, rubbing a bit of glittery silver eyeshadow on her eyelids. As Ryujin watches her, taking in her short white dress and freshly dyed black hair, her pink lips and slightly flushed cheeks, she can’t help but wonder what Chaeryeong would taste like. Maybe it is a sex thing. “But I like it.”
Chaeryeong blinks at her reflection in the mirror of her vanity before her gaze shifts to Ryujin, then she turns. Ryujin suddenly feels hot and adjusts herself on the bed where she sits. Chaeryeong scans her face before humming. “You want to eat people?”
Ryujin still couldn't get used to the way Chaeryeong asks her questions. The way Chaeryeong always wants to know what happens in Ryujin’s mind, wants to pick it apart cell by cell. She wouldn’t even care about the blood spilling onto her fingers and palms, ruining her dress and stockings. Ryujin shrugs as Chaeryeong stands. She forces her eyes to stay on Chaeryeong’s face, and not her chest or her thighs or anything that doesn’t make her hands twitch. She’s starving. “I just think I get it from a romance and or sexual perspective. A lot of different media explore that idea, you know that?”
Chaeryeong giggles, flirting. “Film freak.”
Chaeryeong is in her space now, leaning close. She smells nice, sweet, like cinnamon and honey. Her smile is all teeth. “What?” Ryujin whispers as Chaeryeong bites her bottom lip. Even if Ryujin thought she had an advantage, a hold over Chaeryeong that she couldn’t deny—and vice versa—she always seems like she knows something Ryujin doesn’t, especially in moments like these.
“Would you eat me then?” Chaeryeong wonders, tilting her head. Ryujin wonders which one of them is going to break eye contact first. “If you were hungry?”
Hm. “I think that,” Ryujin says slowly, voice low and hushed. Chaeryeong’s eyes do this thing, where they get so dark that they look black, deep, and endless. It always makes Ryujin feel like she could get lost in the other woman forever. “I would. Yes, I would.” Ryujin’s ears are buzzing, heart banging in her chest. Her cardiologist would say it’s a miracle if he were here now to press his stethoscope against her chest. He wasn’t, nobody else existed; the universe always ends up as just the two of them. Ryujin is happy, giddy, if only because of the way Chaeryeong shivers against her.
“And you would eat me. I know you would.” There’s a moment of quiet before Chaeryeong presses her mouth to Ryujin’s own, kissing her.
Ryujin hears her whisper as Chaeryeong holds her face in her hands, keeping her gaze all to herself. “Until there was nothing left for anybody else.”
Chaeryeong’s phone pings loudly, breaking the moment. Ryujin blinks rapidly and Chaeryeong giggles, standing up straight and adjusting the bottom of her dress. This time, Ryujin does look at her thighs.
“We should go, Yuna’s going to blow a fuse.”
At the door, as Ryujin slides on her jacket, Chaeryeong walks into her space, smiling softly. Ryujin smiles back as Chaeryeong cups her chin in one hand, her nails lightly pressing into the skin of Ryujin’s cheeks, before she leans in and pretends to take a bite of her cheek. Ryujin feels a giggle rise out of her throat as Chaeryeong rubs her nose into her cheek.
“I would be honored to eat you, you know. If it came to that.”
x.
Ryujin is in need. It’s overwhelming, her stomach growls something fierce. She might have been sweating during her sleep, strands of hair sticking to her face.
She’s hungry. Ryujin is so hungry.
Next to her, Chaeryeong watches from where she sits at her desk, lights dim. Her eyes flutter as Ryujin’s gaze focuses on her, and she licks her lips. She throws off the blanket and stands, her large shirt falling to the tops of her thighs, which makes Chaeryeong stare.
“Chaeryeong,” Ryujin whispers, then waits for Chaeryeong to run her eyes up Ryujin’s body to meet her gaze. “I am starving.” It’s a statement and a question and a plea, all tangled into a few words. Chaeryeong doesn’t look away again, her hands tugging at the bottom of Ryujin’s shirt, pulling her closer.
“You are, aren’t you?”
Ryujin nods. She sees Chaeryeong swallow and can’t help herself, leans in close, and brushes her nose against her neck. “I am. You promised me.”
Chaeryeong lets Ryujin sit in her lap and kiss her, rubbing her hands up and down her thighs. She hears Ryujin’s stomach again, and then they’re falling to the ground, the chair tipping over because of the weight. Ryujin runs her hands everywhere she can touch before she sits up, Chaeryeong lying under her.
And Chaeryeong can only watch, her eyes dark with desire that reflected Ryujin’s own. And she can only watch as Ryujin skins her teeth into her own skin, never breaking eye contact until she slides them closed. It’s an amazing sight, Chaeryeong would later tell her. “You should have seen yourself from my eyes then.”
Chaeryeong can only watch and gasp as Ryujin pulls her head back like a hungry beast, blood dripping from her mouth, down her chin, dripping onto Chaeryeong’s skin, near her necklace on her chest. She clutches at Ryujin, nodding as Ryujin brings her hand to her mouth and gently tugs out the skin between her teeth.
Ryujin can’t stop the smile that grows on her face. She brings her fingers against Chaeryeong’s mouth. “You’re hungry too,” Ryujin whispers. “Eat.”
Chaeryeong does. Ryujin watches her mouth, captivated. Chaeryeong swallows and breathes. “We’re monsters now. Both of us.”