Paradox

She smiled as she passed him, and he only acknowledged her with that odd, upward nod that boys so often use when they are trying to appear cooler than they actually are. But she wasn't smiling for his benefit. She was smiling for hers. Despite everything she was feeling, she smiled, but only because it would have been impossible to smile with half of her face and allow the other half to fall into a heartbreaking, bone chilling frown.

She surveyed the mark on his neck. It was not quite a bruise, more like a blood blister, and she smiled wider. People would ask him all day about that mark, and they would never suspect that she had been the one to give it to him.

She remembered the similar marks that spotted her breasts and stomach, and the momentary scare they had given her that morning before it all came back to her. She had looked in the mirror and gasped before recalling the previous night. She tried not to look at them as she moved into the shower.

She had cringed as the scalding water ran over the scratches on her back, yet another reminder of her night with him. And as the water soaked her body, removing all traces of him, it had mixed with salty, bitter tears as they slid down her face.

It had been wrong, in theory. She was a good girl. She never strayed from the rules or questioned her place in the world, she simply obeyed. And then, he was there; so close, so attractive. She inhaled the liquor on his breath as if it were giving her new life, she gave herself to him, and it was so wrong. But it felt so right.

And she was alive. It was as if their parting kiss was her first. As if the sting of the scratches on her back was the sharpest, rawest, most exhilarating pain she had ever known. She was living life for the first time, and it was wonderful and terrible and terrifying all at once.

So she smiled despite the sting of the scratches on her back and the weight of her shame that she wore heavily on her heart. She smiled. And only he knew why.