"Look, babe," my eyesight was level to the eye of the revolver. It was a staring contest where a blink could mean the difference between life and death, "You wouldn't last a minute on the Creek."

I laughed.

Irony. I could taste it in the air, frigid and stale like my beat bones, searching for a resting place in the metaphysical form of this situation. Coincidence and tragedy like to have hot passionate sex somewhere between the sheets of this reality, and we, we were the accidental mishap that happens when a flimsy bit of rubber breaks. Can someone say back alley abortion?

He slaps me with the back of his hand. Hard. I taste blood in my mouth.

"Stop your daydreaming, girl," His eyes betray his lips, dry and crackled, hydrated with slow swipes of tongue. It belongs in my mouth. Aha. Something in his pants betrays his eyes. He wishes it was in my mouth, "Listen."

I spit in his face. I smile.

"I'm all ears."

He grabs a fistful of hair from the back of my scalp and tugs hard. The brute force of his arm thrusts me against the brick wall, and I think about how artistic it is to have my back fractured and bruised against the vibrant graffiti defacing public property.

That's what he was: this big, bold, Technicolor coat of chaos and beauty and grime and rebellion. Of ugliness and rawness and everything illegal and bad but so, so right. He was life itself. He was Death.

I bend my knees and slowly move downward, back against the wall, feeling blood trail from above, all the way down the wall in streaks of scarlet. I sit, hug my knees, and look up at him with big liquid eyes from behind locks of stringy chestnut hair.

It always does the trick.

He looks away. The gun isn't pointed between my eyes anymore. He lowers it. Lowers his gaze. Bends down to look at me. I look up and meet his eyes.

"Darling," Voice lower than a whisper, it seems. His attempt at gentle still comes out rough and curt. Still cuts through the tension better than a hot knife through butter. Better than a hot knife thrust between rib cages and twisted at the blade, "You'll be the death of me."

I give him a winning smile. The curl of my lips betrayed only by the tears in my eyes.

"I love you."

He turns away from my gaze. It's because I let my walls down, the ones he so skillfully taught me to build up around myself. Any bit of morality left in a person can be easily slaughtered in a place like this, he would tell me. I show him vulnerability. Gets him every time.

"That's bullshit," He sneers, then cups my cheek in his hands and pushes my mouth into his in a collision of lips and tongue and teeth from which the monochrome overtones of the alley walls explode into the pretty kind of graffiti you'd find in places like Haight Street or some other pretentious pseudo-impoverished Bohemian alleyway. Places without all the filth and ruin and reality. Places without him.

"You know it." I give him a grin that the Cheshire Cat would pale in comparison to. He gives me one of his irked grimaces and shuts me up with another forceful kiss.

A coarse hand finds its way up my feeble blue dress, and his face feels like sandpaper against my sensitive skin. Carelessly dropping the gun aside, he runs his hands through my tangled hair as thoughts run through our tangled minds. A touch of flesh here, a grope of skin there. Two bodies burning and writhing in flames of passion. Two heavy breathes fogging up logic and the metaphorical mirrors of who we are and what we are supposed to be.

Don't think I so easily forget.

I rake my fingers across his back. I know he likes that. Move around, a bit away from his body, so that he can come after in more anxious lust. That's right. Be a tease. Move him closer and closer to that corner of the wall where you can finally change your fate. That's it, girl. Get him wanting. Blind him.

And so I back up. Move my hand behind me. Feel the cold metal of salvation in my hands. Slowly get my fingers around its handle…

He looks up.

Sees the gun in my hand. Swats it away. It disappears somewhere far off. Maybe behind a dumpster. He looks at me, anger a very visible flame in his amber eyes.

"Fucking slut!" He grabs my hands and holds them above my head, sucking the poison out of my lips like no one else can. I turn away and smile. It was worth a try. I arch my back up and feel his yearning against my own. His tongue explores my mouth.

I bite. Hard.

The blood floods into my mouth. I swallow. I smile.

"Gah!" he gets off me and wipes the blood trickling from his chin, "You're a crazy bitch, ya know that?"

I sit up, not bothering to pull up the straps of my dress, "Thanks, hun."

I pull myself and my dress straps up, wondering how closely I resembled a zombie, with my hair in disarray and blood and dirt staining my clothes and body.

I start to walk away.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

I look at him. Walls up. Dead pan. Monotone. "I'm going to the Creek."

He paces toward me. Footsteps echoing dread. "I'm not gonna let that happen, dear."

I grimace.

"Hunter," his expression melts. I watch his façade slowly fall to the cold hard ground. The strength and infallibility thaw into what was once an innocent boy with a clean slate. An innocent boy thrown into a dark, menacing world. His cover dissolves, with just one word. One utterance of a past he likes to keep tucked in the deepest, darkest crevices of his subconscious. A life once lived. "Go get your gun."

He runs one direction. I run the other.

I escape. I always do.

But he always kills me. Every fucking time.