"You were just a ******** to me," he snarled, hackles raised.
"You were just a face to me," the artist, her voice smooth and icy.
The painting hung between them, the model's face grim and elegant. He'd watched her, in the lazy summer, when their intertwined fingers made prisms of light upon the canvas. He had seen his features shaped from rough charcoal, painted with infinite care. He had seen himself through her eyes, how his features became beautiful, lit with afterglow.
And now it was sold. To some anonymous buyer in California, and it felt like she had sold him along with it, because now she did not need him.
They made love on the floor, on the lush Persian carpet, if you could call it love. It was angry and brutal and each told themselves that they were only doing it to spite the other, to show them what they could have had, could have been. If only the other wasn't so ******** stubborn.
Both left bruises on the other's body, although it may not have been intentional. And it may well have been; love had made them malicious and bitter.
In the afterglow, when she sighed, I love you into his ear, he pretended not to hear her.
