Behind your mum's back, we stole her Valium from the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom, never more than a few at once, never enough to get caught. Back in your room, lock triple-checked, walls stippled with early spring sunshine, we crushed the pills under a metal teaspoon, the one with a giraffe embossed on the handle, a baptism gift from your aunt, and mixed the powder with confectioner's sugar. Whiter than the inside of your thigh. You held the back of my head as I licked it off your walnut desk, eyes already hazy before the anticipation melted into sedation. When I lay down in bed, atop the cherry-print comforter that smelled like your wild jasmine body butter and anti-lice shampoo, your fingers circled gently around my wrist. Your mouth had more teeth than it ought to, I thought, and your eyes were so gorgeously sparkly, a shade of green like a beer bottle. You didn't kiss me, not then. When I came back to, a fairy ring glimmered on my belly, each bruise a match to one of your canines. I pressed my own fingertips into them one by one, chasing that dull ache, and sunk deeper in the quicksand of amnesia. I had the marks but not the memory. Only you knew what you'd done to me. Only you knew how my body had reacted to your touch. A thin, druggy glaze clung to me until the next morning, when I drooped over my porridge, surreptitiously fingering the skin beneath my t-shirt, and craved sugar clotting on the back of my tongue.

When you licked your mum's crushed-up diazepam off the desk a week later, I wanted to kiss the taste of it out of your mouth. Your smile, as you sprawled out in bed, was so lovely. I'd never forget it, not ever. You didn't say anything. Not out loud, anyway, but I felt your words seep into me, your voice in my head clear as a lake after a storm. You blacked out slowly, so sweetly, and exhaled a weak noise every time my mouth touched your skin. I used a razor blade we'd stolen from your big sister, and I put it right beneath the crease of your thigh. Every time you moved, the following days, the wound would chafe, burn, and eventually bloom into a scar that would stay with you forever.

Outside, your dad revved the lawn mower. I could hear it until I couldn't, until consciousness released my body into your harshly tender hands. Every night, I dreamt of teeth and switchblades. I dreamt of your red-polished fingernails crescenting my skin, your sweet little mouth touching mine. Gently, gently. I'd wake up in a cocoon of cold sweat and bear down my palm between my legs, nearly not breathing, lost in the aftermath of impact, the void of origin. I shuddered violently.

I imagined my body shuddered similarly when you bruised me. You, at least, shuddered similarly when I touched you. Sleeping Beauty, we called it, our most favourite game, our dirtiest secret, the most special thing I've ever shared with anyone. Even now, when I walk through the park and see someone drinking a Carlsberg, I think of your eyes and how they looked at me before I passed out. How you looked at me when you knew I was completely at your mercy.
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