Bite Club
You can’t imagine how much fun we’re having.
Banner by JessaRox
This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.
I know this because Masen knows this.
No copyright infringement intended.
I own nothing. Not even an imaginary friend.
Give me lust, baby.
Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash.
Chuck Palahniuk,
Invisible Monsters
One
I make napalm and blow up my house.
Don’t ask. I don’t even remember doing it, but what is left of the bathtub looks like it’s been through an atomic explosion. I have a receipt in my pocket for enough cat litter to supply an animal shelter and there are five empty fuel tanks in the back of my car.
More than enough of both to gut a house.
More than enough to blast my Ethan Allen couch clear across the street and litter tiny shards of my dishes across the lawn. More than enough to sink slivers of my coffee table into the porch railings and launch my Henkle Harris dining room set high enough that half of it landed in the trees.
I tell the police that it was the pilot light, the temperamental flame that regularly blows out and fills the house with gas all day long while I’m at work. The refrigerator must have kicked on.
I guess these things just happen.
They don’t believe me.
TWO
This is how I meet Masen.
In jail.
THREE
Every visit to this place is predictable. Same rotten, pissing drunks. Same crusted, catcalling girls. Same dismal fluorescent lighting that gives everything hepatitis. They toss me into a cell with another guy and my one-free-phone-call has been wasted on my good-for-nothing lawyer. It’s probably best that I never sleep anyway, because I sure didn’t plan on doing any of that here.
“Hey man.” A guy slouched against the wall nods at me. “Whatcha’ in for?”
“I think I blew up my house.” All the hair on my arms is singed and the back of my throat tastes like the tailpipe of a shitty old car.
“You think?” he laughs. “That’s the kind of thing you probably know for sure, or not.”
“I don’t remember. I haven’t been sleeping and I have this problem.”
“A girl,” he smirks and winks at me like I have her name carved across my forehead. A flashing neon sign.
FOUR
My doctor is a fuckwad. Right up there with my good-for-nothing-lawyer.
I beg him for pills. Justify them with endless nights spent staring at the walls and torturous days spent trying to decide if I was a hologram. Most days, everything else is a hologram.
Life, as seen through a funhouse mirror.
I was desperate. I sit in his shitty little office and my mouth waters for little white pills. Throat burns for pale, pastel blue. The blood-stained red of lipstick. 200 mg, 400 mg. Any dosage, any fucking color. I tell him that it’s impacting my job, my sex life, even though both are basically shit and none of that is from the insomnia.
He tells me to get a grip.
“You should come back tomorrow night. There’s a support group for insomniacs, they might be able to talk some sense into you.” He hands me a pamphlet and leaves, the giant ass for brains with his squeaky orthopedic shoes and his cheap comb-over.
I throw the pamphlet in his trash can, but show up anyway.
FIVE
The bottom level of the hospital reminds me of jail. Concrete floors stinking with bleach. Watered down coffee and doors that lock from only the outside. More of that hepatitis lighting. I join the little huddle of chairs in the center of a great big empty room with six other people who all look like ghosts. Pallid and practically see through.
Holograms. All of them.
I write a random name on my name tag, just to throw them off the scent.
I’m not signing up for this.
SIX
Emmett, the big cream puff, hugs me and tells me to cry.
I didn’t sign up for this.
Emmett used to be a model. Shoes, socks, underwear, you name it. Jack of all trades. Family themed shoots for major label catalogues before skipping out early to film bondage porn. The high life, until the insomnia hit. Looking like a ghost doesn’t go over well in the modeling business.
Before he knew it, he was popping any pill he could get his hand on just to sleep.
“I lost my jobs. My wife. She took the kids. We don’t talk,” Emmett cries into my hair, crushing me against his chest. He’s taken up lifting weights to tire himself out and he looks like a steroid junkie. Grotesquely muscled and laced with throbbing veins. “I can only sleep after I’ve heard my muscles tear.”
When I pull away, there’s a blurry wet stain of my face on the front of his shirt and my eyes are burning.
SEVEN
I sleep like a fucking baby.
A log.
The dead.
Like I haven’t slept in years and I go back to that ugly basement to cry on Emmett every time I feel myself slipping. Write that same random name on my name tag. Drink their shitty coffee and listen to others complain about the miseries of the sleepless.
Deflect every time they ask me to join in. I didn’t sign up for this. I’m not here to share.
I’m here to fucking cry.
EIGHT
Everything is great.
Until she shows up and ruins it all.
NINE
Bella Fucking Swan.
The little liar. The heartless fake.
“She can’t sleep either,” Emmett - the fucking cream puff - jerks his thumb at her and she smirks at me.
Yeah fucking right. That girl is such bullshit. She probably forces herself to stay awake and tells you she does it for her ‘art.’ She probably paints those baggy eyes on every morning and drinks way too much coffee. Her bones stick out of her face like her skull is made of sugar and her skin is the color of watered-down strong brew.
But her eyes are bright and her mouth doesn’t sag the way everyone else’s does.
She can sleep. I know it.
She stares at me from across the circle, chewing off her nails for thirty two minutes. Gets to me before Emmett does when we split for one-on-ones. Prances right over and rubs up against me like sandpaper. Smiles all pretty and throws her arms around my neck.
I choke down the shuddering urge to recoil.
She licks her lips and I imagine her naked. I can’t help it. Underneath the too-tight, too-much-mess of her clothing, there’s gotta be a decent pair of tits. Her pussy probably tastes like burnt butterscotch and I bet she’s the kind of girl who’ll just as soon rip your hair out as kiss you when she cums.
I know she’s the kind that falls asleep afterward.
“I’m on to you,” I tell her.
“Oh, really?” Bella presses right up against me and breathes into my mouth. Her eyes are sunken deep into bruised rose shadows and she blinks five times while I tell her that she doesn’t need this. She is vacationing in the mouthwatering tragedy of other people’s pain for the pure daytripper excitement, like a kid in a fucking amusement park.
“A tourist, that’s what you are.” I push her away, trying to put some fucking space between us, but she’s impossible to move. Bella bats her eyes and her mouth curls up at the side.
“Spot on, Sherlock,” she purrs. “I’m just here for the next cheap thrill. And the coffee might be terrible, but it’s free.” She presses her face to my chest and huffs up a sham of a sob, a badly-drawn reproduction of the tears and the snot and the guilt they say we’re supposed to be letting go of.
I don’t cry.
I can’t cry.
Instead, I let her dance me all around that room like we’re royalty at some high school prom. I barely resist the urge to pull her into a dark corner to give her a hard and thorough fucking. That or knock that goddamn smirk off her face.
This isn’t love at first sight.
This is resentment at first glance.
TEN
I go home that night and don’t fucking sleep at all.
I jack off twice just thinking about her.
One sleepless week later, instead of going to the hospital, I blow up my house.
ELEVEN
“I want to meet this girl.” Cell mate has greasy wild hair and sunken green eyes, wickedly bloodshot, so he must be flying cloud-level on something really good.
“No, you don’t,” I huff bitterly. “That girl is poison. Besides, I don’t think I’m getting out of here for a while.”
After all, I did supposedly blow up my house.
“I don’t know . . . we might get out sooner than you think,” he says slyly, as though he’s in on a secret I’m not. The guy in the cell next door is eyeing us and I’m pretty sure my roommate must be crazy. I don’t ask him what he’s in for. From the looks of it, probably drugs.
“I don’t even know you.”
He holds out his hand, skin smudged, dirt around his nails. “Masen.”
I don’t tell him my last name either.
“Edward.”
TWELVE
He springs us both in less than an hour.
Bats his eyes at the girl behind the desk and promises to fuck her later if she’ll just unlock the cell doors for him. She’s too young to be here, probably some copper’s daughter working a summer desk job. This guy is so far out of her realm that she’s punching numbers before she’s even nodding yes.
“Best part about virgins?” Masen asks me as the girl rounds the desk. I shake my head and he winks at me. “They bleed.”
I wait out front and smoke three cigarettes while he pounds her into the back wall of the closet where they keep all the confiscated drugs.
He comes out smelling like weed and vaginal fluid, wiping blood off his face.
THIRTEEN
Masen steals a car. Not a nice car either. A beat up Cadillac the color of curdled milk, seats gone squashy as the upholstery leaks out of the cracked leather. He hurtles down the highway like a bullet from a gun and I’m trying not to think about what the fuck we’re gonna do. We have precisely thirty two minutes before the police catch on that something shady went down. I still don’t know why they had him locked away, but I’m pretty sure I blew up my house.
I don’t even remember why I did it.
“You did it to prove something,” Masen says and guns the engine.
“To who?”
“Yourself. Do you ever think about dying?” He flicks his cigarette out the window, a fire wash of sparks exploding behind us.
“A lot,” I say but he shakes his head.
“You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t waste yourself like that.” He sounds disgusted, like someone ran over his dog without stopping and left it all smashed and bleeding in the road.
“You can’t appreciate life without it,” I tell him and his face goes rigid, monstrous with rage.
“You really feel that way?”
“Fuck. My life is an inside joke and I’m not in on the punch line. Death would be a relief at this point.”
“You want death? You’ve got it,” Masen growls at me and jerks the wheel.
Spasm, hard to the right.
The car swerves into oncoming traffic.
I scream.
FOURTEEN
A car blares its horn and barely misses our bumper, hissing as it hurtles by with mere centimeters to spare. Screaming. Wailing within inches of life and death.
“This is your life, Edward, and it’s ending! Every second!” Masen yells over the wind and the horns. A second car swerves to miss us and then another and it’s only a matter of time before we end up cat food on the freeway. I yell at him to stop, but he just keeps smoking and laughing and daring those other cars to hit us.
All I can see are headlights.
All I can hear is Masen’s manic laugh.
All I can see are fiery explosions of metal and shrapnel sprays of glass.
Maybe I’m just thinking of my house.
“Think about it Edward. The special-snowflake lies you’ve been fed, it’s all just for show.” He turns to look at me and for a second I think his eyes are bleeding. Whatever he’s on must be kicking in because he’s gone bloodless and pale and his eyes are wizard of oz green in pools of broken heart red.
“Death,” he says. “Death is the true masterpiece.”
I lunge for the wheel and try to yank us back but he locks his grip and I’m just pulling on nothing.
“Only in death can you finally appreciate joy,” he shouts. “Or love or lust or just fucking the shit out of some girl because it feels so goddamn good. Death is the great leveler and life is no good without it.”
Masen is preaching as though he has an audience. I look in the back seat but there’s no one there and through the back window I catch sight of the pileup building behind us. Damming the freeway with a warped wall of wreckage. Destruction behind us and turmoil ahead. We are the bright little center of the universe. Untouchable, infallible. Hurtling toward some sort of glory.
Everything else is just smoldering shit.
I try to pull on the wheel again and Masen glares at me, face flashing dark and light and dark from the blazing high beams of the oncoming cars. He sighs over the wind and finally twists the wheel, nearly breaking my wrist to speed off the freeway. Flies the wrong way up an exit ramp. Blows through two red lights and three stop signs, near disaster in every intersection before screeching to halt in a dark alleyway, killing the engine.
The silence is deafening.
“Was that my near death experience?” I croak, breathing hard enough to punch my lungs right through my ribs and Masen just flashes me a sardonic smile.
“No, Edward. That was your near life experience.”
FIFTEEN
We ditch the car and end up at a bar. Some shit hole in the wall with a crusted hooker patrolling the pavement out front. Masen struts in like he owns the place but he makes me order for both of us.
He also makes me pay.
It takes six beers and thirty seven minutes for me to really begin to appreciate the vast pile of shit I was now in. I had it pretty good, but then I went and fucked it up. I bought that sofa, that dining room table with eight chairs and an overpriced television. Sixty three square inches, too overwhelming to even look at. Even a thousand-thread-count duvet made by kids somewhere in China that started fraying the moment I opened the box. No matter my shitty job or my fucked up head or my unwavering lack of intimacy with anyone other than myself, I had my comfortable, boring home.
Despite everything else, I had that Ethan Allen couch. The Henkle Harris table.
My couch now looks like something they pulled out of Hiroshima and my table is in the trees.
“I fucking blew up my house,” I say after a while.
“That’s all just petty bullshit, Edward. Your couches and tv sets. Your clothes. Your precious, mundane human crap,” Masen huffs. “Stop your fucking moaning. It’s time to evolve. You talk like that damn sofa fucking owns you. You should not be owned by your life. You should own it.”
“You are not your house,” Masen says and I obviously hate my house.
“You are not your job,” Masen says and I really hate my job.
“You are not your fucking khakis,” Masen says and I hate my fucking khakis.
If I had a girlfriend, I would probably hate her too.
SIXTEEN
Masen lets me get through another beer and four stinging shots of whiskey. He’s been trying to give me a pep talk but he’s the worst cheerleader ever.
“You gotta shake this off, man. You’re just wallowing in your own shit right now and your life is so much fucking bigger than that. You are going to waste.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I grumble into my beer.
Masen shrugs. “Ok. I’m a vampire,” he says like it’s nothing.
“No fucking way.”
He pulls back his lips and bares his teeth at me. Pearly white. Gleaming. A sharp set of canines dip into the black cavern of his throat. He hisses at me, tongues his fangs, and pulls his lips down over them. He looks so normal.
“Am I drunk?”
“Very.”
“You just showed me your fangs.”
“I did.”
SEVENTEEN
“Are you allowed to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Show me those.” I wave drunkenly at Masen.
“Not technically. No.”
“Are there rules?”
“More than you would think.”
“Tell me.”
“The first rule is that you can’t talk about it.”
“You can’t?”
“No. If you do, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Ok,” I gulped. “What’s the next rule?”
“You can’t fucking talk about it,” Masen growls.
“But that’s the first rule again.”
“It’s also the second.”
“They’re the same?”
“Yes. Because it’s that important.”
“Ok, what’s the third rule? Please don’t tell me not to talk about it.”
“If you kill someone, it’s all over.”
“You don’t kill anyone?”
“Not unless they talk about it.” Masen almost smiles, but doesn’t.
EIGHTEEN
We drink until I’m nearly falling off the stool. I throw up when the cool outside air hits my face, too hot and too cold. It’s been so fucking long since I’ve slept. Masen stands across the lot and smokes while I empty my stomach, acid burning ragged up my throat and coming out nuclear orange. He flicks the butt away after I’ve wiped my face and eyes me like he wants to eat me.
He might.
“I want you to bite me as hard as you can.”
“No!” I roll my eyes. I might be drunk, but I’m not that drunk.
“Just do it.”
“I can’t fucking do that. I’m not gonna bite you.”
“Then hit me.” He starts bouncing on his toes like a boxer.
“Why?”
“I just -” he pauses. “I just need you to do it. Just do it.” He bounces some more and demands again. “Hit me.”
“My hand.” The guy looks like he’s carved from marble. I’ll definitely break my hand on his face.
“Fine.” Masen rolls his eyes and swings. He clocks me in the jaw hard enough to make me see stars and spring that shitty filling right out of my molar. A cheap mercury version and I spit it out in a bloody gob between my feet.
“Ow! You fucker!” I yowl and clutch my jaw, lunging at him with my own fist. Fuck if his face will break it or not.
It does.
“Did you do it?” Masen is still poised for the hit, eyes closed and fists clenched as I clutch my broken hand.
“Yeah, I fucking did it,” I hiss. “You couldn’t feel it? At all?”
He looks really sad for half a second before he comes at me again in a snarl of fists and those fucking fangs. For a moment I’m sure he’s going to bite me but he just hits me again. Flattens me with a single punch and I reel away, feet gone numb, teeth through my cheek and mouth full of blood before I even hit the concrete.
He wakes me up by slapping me hard across my face, double whammy, and when he picks me up the world is looping endless repeat to a steady, high-pitched whine.
“You ok?” He pats me down.
“I can taste my brain,” I tell him. “Do it again.”
NINETEEN
Masen lives in a fucking shit hole.
Buried in an unfriendly forest, dark as fucking night. It was probably a nice family home at some point but whoever took care of it had left a long time ago. I was almost sure Masen was squatting.
The house smells musty like something caught on fire and crawled under the couch to die. The carpets are gone, wallpaper torched and peeling. There’s something that looks like a bloodstain on the floor in my new bedroom. The water runs brown, which explains his ever present grime and careless, worn-through clothing.
Only half of the lights work, but he can basically see in the dark.
I sit at the kitchen table and hiss through the sting of rubbing alcohol against my broken-open skin while Masen roller skates through a fine carpeting of pebbled glass from all the broken-out windows.
TWENTY
I go to the hospital out of habit.
It’s Thursday and nothing has really changed but everything is different. Now, I’m not sleeping because of the pain in my side and the fact that my face feels like the steaming hot end of a nuclear missile. Now, instead of shitty coffee I drink my own blood.
The constant drip-drip-drip down the back of my throat.
I spot Bella loitering out front before the group meets to wallow in their collective torment. In twenty minutes we’ll be asked to pair up and normally I’d sob my face off between Emmett’s pumped up pecs, but I can’t do that with her here. I can’t do what I want to do, which is grab her and shake her hard enough to rattle her brain. Scream in her lying, smoke-filled face.
You heartless fake.
You wicked, bloodsucking girl.
Fucking tourist.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask her instead.
“What happened to your face?” she snaps, puffing on her cigarette. She’s not even listening to me, just eyeing my mouth and running her tongue across her lips, chapped and peeling, between mouthfuls of smoke. My face is a fucking train wreck. Masen damn near broke my cheek and definitely shattered my nose. I’m wearing a clown mask of blue and red bruises.
“You don’t need this, not like I do,” I tell her. I want to tell her that it makes her no better than Masen. That it makes her a fucking vampire, but instead I tell her that it’s the only thing I have that makes any sense anymore.
“You sound like a junkie.” She blows smoke in my face and I wave it away.
“Why do you keep coming back?” I ask her and she ignores me again, just like Masen.
“Is that your blood?” She points at me with the smoldering end of her cigarette. I glance down at myself, a constellation of bright red splatters against the fabric, and shrug.
This is Epic! I'm so freaking in love.
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