This Tariq wore a thick scab across his knuckles, and his best friend’s grill inside his mouth. This Tariq convinced me in a way no one else did. I did not suspect him before the barbecue. Not once.
I did not expect that he wanted to come between Cherish and me.
When Tariq’s kiss becomes more soft lips and electricity in the hollow of our cheeks, I let my tongue slip forward—and then retract it as though stung. As though I’m unaccustomed to being the aggressor, unfamiliar with how to show him that I want more.
My tongue is a baited hook, and he returns his to me, his hands slipping around my neck and down into the small of my back—and then lower. He’s been invited, and he will unfurl his greed completely.
I test Tariq’s tip with my teeth, just enough to take hold, my lips spreading into a grin as though to show him what I’ve done. He responds with an aroused grunt, amused.
I release him, and he barges back in. He swims past my row of teeth of his own volition, because I am not a threat.
I hold him with my lips this time, and Tariq leans in, one hand tightening with the back of my shirt inside. I slowly pull back, so that his tongue is incrementally exposed, and he presses back into my mouth.
His eyes are closed when I open mine.
I bite.
Hard, because this is not a test. I clamp my teeth and force the two rows toward each other as though what’s between them is food.
Tariq’s eyes are wild, bypassing shock and confusion to hurtle toward pain. He wants to get free, but trying will inevitably worsen this.
When he jerks, as though to tear a layer of cellophane away, I do not release. What he succeeds in freeing from my hold is forced to escape between my teeth. It is the bit that I exposed a moment ago, and nothing more. I know by the sounds he makes—the sounds that do not resemble any I have heard before, even from a monk seal or a fallen boy in this very spot—that it is an unpleasant experience. I taste that even what gets released is not entirely intact. Whatever the top layer of his tongue looked like before this kiss, it is painted on the back of my teeth. The glossy underside has nothing to shed and—if he can distinguish between the two sensations, if he has the presence of mind to contrast them—it must be the more sensitive of the two.
I still hold a good portion of Tariq’s tongue between my teeth.
He’s trying to say my name. He’s pleading.
The saliva that runs from both sides of his mouth spills into mine, some cascading down his face. The light makes it easy to see, a thick fluid glazing us both.
The texture is unique. The deeper I bite, the tougher the meat becomes—if it can be considered meat. Whatever it is, the tongue of many beasts is deemed appropriate for eating, though I’ve never had it. I don’t know how it should taste, when properly prepared, but with it wriggling in my mouth, I imagine Tariq’s tongue is something like a stale gumdrop. Inside, it will be smooth and sticky. I only have to slice through it.
Tariq is hurting himself. He is writhing and wagging his head in desperation, his hands on my shoulders because he doesn’t know whether to hold me close or try to shove me away.
It’s too late when he understands that I will not let all of him go. He has exhausted the range of agonized, openmouthed whimpers, wails, and cries. He has pleaded in garbled words, spit drowning out what my teeth don’t render incoherent.
He can’t see the fire in the sky behind him. He doesn’t know when it explodes through and what were flames flow like lava down the night sky to remind me what I said to Cherish.
Everything can burn but us.
I cull everything I’ve uncoiled in my belly, all the power I’ve unleashed, and I sink it into Tariq.
The wetness isn’t all saliva anymore, but it feels the same. Metal has swarmed the inside of my mouth before I reopen my eyes. Tariq is locked in my gaze when I complete my bite. My teeth rest together, my face and chest soaked—and there is something resting quietly inside my closed mouth.
Tariq collapses to the grass below me as soon as it’s done. His hands are trembling over the lower half of his face, and he turns to look up at me, his dreaded fringe in his beautiful eyes. He’s shaking his head as though he’s incredulous—as though there’s any use in it.
I want him to show me. I want to see the smooth cross section I have made of his tongue, though what bubbles out between his fingers is thick and red so that I know his whole mouth must be full.
He isn’t thinking straight. He seems more confused by the second, so I open wide. I present my trophy on the tip of my tongue so that he understands. The sight of his dissected tissue is like an anchor. He abandons the hysterical sounds he’s been making and meets my eyes. His sanity is short-lived. Even though I have remained calm—though I was willing to give him as much time as he needs to reconcile himself with what just transpired—he scuttles backward as though there’s a ghost or a boogeyman standing in my place. He manages to fall back against his shoulders before tumbling backward like a barrel being rolled.
I watch him escape, one hand always at his mouth so that there’s only one free to push himself up when he loses balance for some reason and the toes of his shoes make drags and divots in the lawn and on the golf course when he gets that far.
When he’s a wounded silhouette stumbling along because he can’t remember the way he came, I don’t know why he calls back over his shoulder, or what—until I turn back toward the Whitmans’ house.
“RahRah,” is all Cherish can manage, and she watches me take Tariq’s tongue out of my mouth.
XV
She didn’t know.
She doesn’t believe.
She has only ever seen the monster in me.
“Where did you get this?” she asks when I show her the book.
The Whipping Boy.
“Cherish, it’s an antique.” It’s all I say before her face collapses into tears.
“What does it mean?”
“It means you are too precious to harm, so you let them hurt me instead.”
“I don’t know what Tariq means, I don’t know what Judge Campbell’s done, but you know them. You know who my parents are—”
“And I know you keep a log of all the times you’ve ever hurt me, Cherish. One two three four five.”
We’re standing on my side of the bed. Tariq’s blood is still painted across the lower half of my face, and the book is in Cherish’s hands. She drops to the mattress, and her head and shoulders fall as though she is a star collapsing into itself.
“RahRah,” she says, and my name sounds like despair. “The tallies are all the times you hurt me.”
Nichole Turner is here. I feel her eyes burrow into the back of me and know that if I turn right now, I’ll find her there. She is flickering in and out of the bedroom, as though she is the flame, returned.