Crimson Cursive

Patricia shifted in her seat.

Sea held up his white hands and looked at them under the lights in the dark room, "this pair of hands, the universe formed from the energy of pure obsession. My entire body, every hair, nail, and burning cell: shaped from the raging white flame of a singular love split into duality." Sea glared up at Patricia with a look that flashed under the light reflecting off the glare of his glasses and her breath halted as she watched him.

"Find the tune that plays you like a piano because the truth of the matter is, everyone has an obsession," Sea said, throwing his arms out, "it's what keeps our pattern humming along, strumming, thrumming to our obsession's song. The sooner you find it, come to terms with it, understand it, live with it, love it, clarify it, and amplify it, the sooner you can become IT. THAT THING that is YOUR THING. Stop listening to what other people tell you about what you should or should not be doing, what you should or should not be buying, watching, thinking, saying, reading. I guarantee you if someone is trying to tell you what you "should" or "shouldn't" be, they themselves have no idea, they just want to control you, most likely they want something from you. Ask yourself when dealing with people: what do they want from me? If anyone is ever insistent that you do something, that's a red flag that they want something. They are trying to force you into some mold of their own design. Nature grows naturally, it isn't forced into doing it. What you're truly seeking doesn't want anything from you. It wants what you want, using this method you can find your path, THAT THING, YOUR THING."

Sea took a drink of water out of an onyx cup and there was silence before he started talking again. Patricia wanted to dismiss his mad ramblings, but his talk was seductive and she found his words pulling her along in her seat.

"There's no freewill on a page of words, you read it and the characters play out how they're written, despite all their thoughts and emotions, you as the reader, knows, no matter how many times you read it, their parts don't change. They're set into and between the words, unchanging. What makes any of us think we are any different as we scurry across the face of this planet? Freewill? I haven't seen it, and as soon as you realize this fact, the sooner you can sink into the words of your unique act and really enjoy what the universe has planned out for you. It wants you blissed out as much as you want to be blissed out, it wants to be fucked as much as you want to fuck it, it want to fuck you as much as you want to be fucked. That's because it is you. So let go, and let it do its thing to you and you to it."

Patricia found herself caught up in the man's words as they resonated with her profoundly. She shook her head and clawed herself out of his flowing river of ideas, bringing herself back to her reason for attending the fake's lecture. She crossed her arms and glanced around at the students silently eating up the words of this con man, what drivel, characters and words on a page? Get real, she was flesh and blood, she was alive and she had freewill, she was her own woman, self-made. She had managed to do everything her father said she couldn't. Her obsessions didn't control her, she controlled them. The nail of her left index finger tapped wildly on the desk.

The class ended while Patricia lost herself in the memories of the screaming matches with her father. Everyone poured out the noisy metal doors and Patricia checked her watch. She figured she could take care of this Professor Sea and be home before 8:00, plenty of enough time to settle in and do a little reading for the rest of the night. Her amber sparks of glass peered past her watch and down into the lecture pit. A girl with black, mousy hair spilled forth from a rounded red door in the shadows towards the back of the room and helped Sea pack his things. Patricia squinted, she didn't know what the obsessive Maison looked like, but she guessed the timid girl fretting over Sea had to be the missing student.

She scooped up her bag and marched down the carpeted stairs like a grand judge on the verge of delivering a sentence. She entered the ring of the lecture pit and the odd couple were so involved with each other, sorting papers, they didn't notice her standing behind them. Patricia cleared her throat.

"What a grand, rambling spectacle of a 'lecture.' Where'd you find the material to spin up such a contrived little web?" Patricia said, her hands on her hips.

Sea glanced over his shoulder, "I'll be with you in one moment Patricia," he said.

A tumbleweed of rage flew into Patricia's chest and she lost her temper, "no! You'll deal with me now."

Sea turned around slowly and hiked up his slacks as he took a seat on the table and looked at her, waiting. Patricia found the flame of her anger sputtering violently under the cold wave embodied by the masterful way he carried himself. The churning vastness that was the darkness of his aspect came to a halt and he focused all of himself upon her. This sudden shift in his attention caught her off guard and she felt her words disintegrating into the boundlessness of his bare, open nothingness. Her tongue was like some strawberry goldfish he had snuffed betwixt his fingers. She was a butterfly he had pinned to the wall with two needles of gold. His eclipsing gaze studied her with the intensity of a single cosmic eye and if he merely blinked, she would utterly disappear. Steadily, she was shrinking, the room was filling up with nothing but the space-expanding energy of his ancient presence, she became like a girl spread across the lap of her father again, atoning for some disrespect. He snipped the tangled web of her entire being, connection after connection with the obsidian scalpels of his pincers. He emptied her of escape until she was down to a single, dripping, crimson thread. She threw herself upon it, white and naked, shielding the crimson cursive from the snap of his chitin scalpels, begging him to let her keep this one thing, the only thing she had left. She could hide nothing from his gaze because he knew her, understood everything about her. All her dirty secrets were no longer secrets to him, they were him.

The only thing that saved Patricia's personality from tumbling past Sea's event horizon into complete dissolution, were the nine ounces of red wine still circulating through her bloodstream. The burning boldness continued to fuel the flame of her anger and it was enough to keep her continuity in tact.

She stepped back a toe from the edge of his abyss and struggled to regain a hold onto the anchor of her rage, since it was the only thing keeping her consciousness connected to her body. Patricia gathered up the tattered threads of her ego and wound them around the ball of tipsy fury. Even though, by stepping too close to Sea's complete attention, she had lost most of the connections to the rest of herself, her crimson core was still in tact and it was just enough for her to resurface as an entity in the hole of her mind and wrest control from the lapping emptiness that flooded into her.

Consciously, she had no idea what had happened to her, but unconsciously, she reeled from his near annihilation of her mind. The rapid, forced vacancy of her interior faded and the ballooning space that dilated her cup into wide-open emptiness, subsided. Her control returned and her tongue was reborn in a flash of maroon. Patricia found herself popping free of his thick, silent bubble and speaking her mind again without missing a beat.

"How dare you!" She yelled, seething and trembling, "this is fraud! I could have you arrested, what do you think you are doing? Maison! Leave those papers where they are, this charade will go on, no longer!"

The empty-eyed girl ignored her and continued to fuss with the papers like Patricia didn't exist.

"What do you want Patricia?" Sea asked, steepling his hands between his legs.

"W-what do I want?" Patricia asked, glancing away from Maison, dumbfounded, "I want you to stop this nonsense, stop hacking our class registration, however you're doing it, and stop pretending to be a professor here. I want you gone."

"But Patricia, I am a professor here," Sea said, tilting his head, "I was here even before you were. I was just on... an interesting sabbatical."

Patricia's temper had never been stretched so far and her vision was pure red as she looked at the handsome interloper sitting calmly on the desk. The reliance on the anchor of her rage against Sea's riptide of attraction, pushed her patience to the limit and it snapped like a hair tie. She rushed forward and poked him hard in the chest with her left index finger, "I want you gone, you're interfering with everything I've ever worked for. You're a creep taking advantage of empty young women. Whatever nasty tricks you pull on them, I won't let you do it to me, it won't work on me, no matter how hard you try." Patricia accentuated each of her points with a jab of her finger into Sea's chest.

Sea's expression didn't change, he just looked down at Patricia's finger poking into his tie. The symmetry of his nostrils flared, inhaling, "are you sure about that, Patricia?" He lifted his head and stared through her.

Before Patricia knew it, a slap echoed out through the lecture hall and her hand was stinging as Sea's glasses went flying from his face. He barely reacted to her slap and continued to gaze through her, but now the unadulterated dreams of his green eyes revealed themselves in all their glory. She glared angrily at Sea as a lock of his dark curls fell forward and only increased the enchantment of his beauty.

"Maison," Sea said, looking down and to his left with his exposed emerald flames hidden beneath black angel wings of long lashes, "relax." He slowly extended an alabaster hand out and Patricia followed it like a dove flying through the dark.

She gasped.

Maison was at her side with a golden dagger flashing near the right side of Patricia's womb. Patricia looked into the girl's eyes and noticed their emptiness had been filled with sharp, possessive determination. There was something still inside Maison and it didn't care for her treatment of Sea.

Patricia eyed the young woman nervously as Maison stepped away and retrieved Sea's glasses from the floor. Maison shook with a gooey euphoria, breathing in Sea's closeness, as she placed the trendy frames back on his face carefully and swiped his curls back with a touch that expressed nothing less than pure love. Maison fixed his tie with delicate, trembling fingers and smoothed the front of his jacket with the flats of her hands. When she was satisfied with how he looked, she went back to organizing the papers behind Sea.

Patricia now saw the non-human monster that was Sea.

"What, what have you done to her?" Patricia asked, shaking.

"Literally: nothing," Sea said, patting the top of his right thigh, watching Patricia.

She stepped back and studied Maison, the freshman looked empty. But Patricia noticed something in her movements, a certain kind of imperceptible jitter that scittered along under her skin like a flowing serpent of pleasurable energy. Patricia swallowed, her mind flashed to the snakeskin folio in her bag. She recognized in Maison, the satisfied bliss of gratified obsession. Patricia's eyes analyzed the girl and the way her mouth rounded, and how her eyes smiled, and the looseness of her muscles, and the pure flowing ease of her movements were familiar. Maison's natural state was reminiscent of how Patricia felt when the red flowing tongue of her incubus was deep inside her head. Maison was abiding in a private nirvana that was three letters wide and started with the letter "S." Patricia gripped her bag, her hands searching for the reassuring feeling of her treasure within.

"You said in your lecture nearly everyone wants something from someone else," Patricia said, "true, but do you think you're any better? You obviously wanted something from this girl, did you not?"

"I didn't want anything from her, Patricia. I simply wanted what she wanted, we wanted the same thing," Sea said, calmly, before adding, "what is it that you want, Patricia?"

A lingering vision of herself spread across his lap and the sensation of the soft miracle that was his hand slapping her ass popped into her head and stuck into her.

"I-I want you," Patricia said, with a small pause, "I want you gone."

"I'll give you what you want," Sea said.

She glared at Sea, relieved, "good, and if I see or even hear that you've set foot on this campus again, I'll have you arrested." She swallowed and pulled a strand of hair from her lips.

Sea nodded, the white glare of his lenses flashing two white disks.

Patricia turned and left, when she pulled open the loud doors at the top of the stairs, she stole one last look at Maison. What secret did the young woman learn from him, what did Sea exactly teach her? Sea glared up at her with the shining circles of his lenses. Patricia shivered unconsciously and left the lecture hall. Walking down the ivory tile of the building with the clicking echoes of her pumps, the adrenaline of her anger faded and Patricia made the most terrifying discovery of all: she was wet.

-

Deeper into the night, Patricia was lounging in the sophisticated disarray of her apartment. She was trying to clear out the last of Sea's impressions upon her psyche which was incredibly invasive. His cold waves of energy had done considerable damage to her consciousness and her unconscious needed time to heal it and pull out all his suckers. Only one stinger remained and it burrowed deeper into her libido every time her unconscious mind approached it.

All of this, Patricia didn't understand consciously of course, and to her, she just felt wiped from a long day of stress. She dug into the plush, leather couch, still steaming from the bath, and now she wanted to continue unwinding with some heavy reading. She sipped on a glass of cool water and undid the karate belt of her terry cloth robe. The water helped flush out any remaining intoxicants of the wine and the hot bath helped open her up even wider. Patricia found the effects of the poems worked best when she was purely sober and her body comfortable.

The folio sat on her coffee table and she stared at it, testing the shortening leash of her resolve. She set the glass of water down and unfurled her robe. The pale pink tulips of her nipples were already erect and the bundle of blooming forsythia between her legs, glistened with the crystal pearls of an early spring. Patricia ran a hand over the perky smoothness of her body, tracing lines of anticipation into her tight, horny flesh with gentle nails.

She held out for as long as she could before she became obsessed with the desire to give in to her profound ache, to feel the pounding words of his heart and fingers inside her. Opening the folder with a trembling hand, she pulled a sheet out at random and ran her fingers across the potent page. The tall, masculine curves of the writing made her wonder who the author was.

The notes appeared randomly when she was grading papers from a particular class, usually the thirteenth in the stack and unnamed. The creamy paper was such a vastly different quality than the cheap printer paper, her fingers were always the first things to encounter their presence. Just touching the paper now made Patricia's sex pay attention. There were only a handful of males in her English 333 class and despite researching each and every one of them, she couldn't figure out who was passing her the intoxicating words.

Patricia felt an electricity of expectation run through her aroused body as she held aloft the sheet of paper in one hand and her own pages of blushing pink in the other.

A snake and its poison

hissing spirals

tiring eyes dry and crying

spitting green truths

that fork in the road

a goad, prodding

down the middle

with balanced sooths

of eternal sighings.

An obsidian snake with spirals for eyes swallowed her wide-eyed on the couch: lies, lies, lies, come lay with me, let's sway, play under the black tree, push and pull each other's clay until we bleed that pretty green into the roots of the tree between. Freedom beneath that lingering gaze I glean, I feel myself its prey, say nothing, drink nothing, I sway, slither, hither and tither, my gaze a sizzling simmer, shimmering and flickering a tongue licking, quickening your pulse, alert, let me eat the lush dessert of your lies, the crushing ones that hurt your thighs, and I'll show you a secret prize, a truth hidden behind cries forbidden, a laugh, a lunge, a soaking grey sponge, dripping, drop, a silky smooth venom: plops, slops and sloshes betwixt your eyes, I WEAR NO DISGUISE, a mask, stuck in a strong cask and clasping straw under a long fuck, shush, hush now, it was just a dream: that's all, the cream of a crop, atop your precious top, our bliss of a second, shared: lopping off the rambling mop you call a woman, scared, you shouldn't have carved something so deeply wooden, wouldn't I do what you said you couldn't? A breeze lifted by the lingering smell of bees, sifted through the leaves fingering dew, searching for something new among the eaves dropping words like fiery white birds of loving coo. Nestled and nuzzling our hearts bustling and buzzing like pits of nervous vipers: hyper sadistic, perversely masochistic: sick and twisted: our snakes bite the colors of white pages and tarry ink, swirl together and form a starry link forged for infinite ages, engorged, swell after swell. A rhythm glowing in the well of hidden skies, flowing and showing what's actually behind these swirling eyes, your prize, a tunnel, our funnel of a shoving path ad astral per orchestral loving sighs, flipping through three trillion paper thin guises: sizing each other up beneath skin cages like two dueling mages under cover, I mean two drooling pages under covers, blindly TWO LOVERS are sipping from one another's cup without realizing their eyes are merging stars arising, surmising and surging up, up above! So below...

"Oh my god," Patricia melted into goo on the couch as a secret love in the form of a cosmic orgasm pumped into her and dripped off the pages between her fingers. Her eyes drooped with heavy ecstasy and she fell under the warm waves of a deep, satisfying sleep.

The rushing static of ocean waves running beneath slushy caves, the moon's attic craves a guest.

In her dreams, the white of her nudity spread itself across Sea's lap. They were back in the lecture hall and Patricia was gripping the pant legs of his slacks, grunting in tune with the heavenly thunder of every blissful smack that ricocheted off the paleness of her reddening rear. She was a stubborn student and she needed extra hours of his attention.

Her unconscious had failed, so far, to pull out the last of his barbs and it continued to pump a deep poison, of Patricia's own design, into the hidden room of her dreamscape.

-

The next morning, Patricia was having trouble sitting at her desk. She woke up on the couch with raw ass cheeks. They looked fine in the mirror, but when she touched them, even lightly, they screamed. So she shifted in her desk chair and dealt with it the best she could, wearing a silky soft dress and everything. She fidgeted, waiting eagerly to spot Dave so she could tell him she took care of his Sea problem. Though Patricia wondered if MU would be better off keeping the handsome Sea, rather than the brown puddle that was Dave who sat at a desk molesting the tight naivete of his male students all day.

But none of that really mattered, all she cared about was going to Nuèch Masco, the end of year masquerade. Her imagination was alive with a potential night of dancing, champagne, elegant costumes, mystery, and rubbing elbows with important people. She twirled a pen and smiled to herself, lost in fantasy. It was a Friday and she only had one class in the morning. After that, she was free the rest of the day to go shopping for a dress and a mask. She hoped she could find a dress in time, but if she didn't she still had two or three possible alternatives floating around her mind that she could wear as backup. What was it going to be like? Attending this extravagant party could change her life, if all the mystery surrounding it was true. She suddenly found herself filled with an ounce of MU pride. Maybe she could find a purple and black accessory, just to show her school spirit off. She had always thought the event a robust myth since no one she knew ever seemed invited, or if they were, they didn't tell anyone. But somehow, everyone had heard of Nuèch Masco and now she was going to be one of those keeping the secret. She smiled.