𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐓 𝐌𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐃 | ateez

𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 #1

My Lovely Venus,

I never understood why guns were called arms.

Arms were for making duvets of skin that envelope you in the swaddle of a chest; they were for shielding you from the elements —southern downpours and howling winds alike— even if it is but for a fleeting moment. It is because of you that I know these things, for I am always welcomed by your tender embrace.

And it is because of you I know that Jupiter's arms are not the kind that you need.

His arms snap your limbs and grind your bones; they are serpents with homocidal minds of their own — to hunt, to feed, to kill. You ask why he is like this? It's because Jupiter is five o' clock shadows and every kind of aesthetic cancer, and to him, this is just the way tough lovin' goes.

You smell it, don't you?

The cynical cyanide, the silent vapor laced in his breath whenever he opened his guillotine of humdinger dalliance. I'm sure when you first met him you couldn't detect it, because I didn't either.  But it wasn't until you and him became united as a 'we' and an 'us' that I realized every crisp syllable Jupiter spoke was draped in a violet benevolence, a sickly honey of wrenching erotic gore that would make any man, any woman, subdue to their primitive desires — it was the underlying danger of being threatened with a good time.

How long have your nails wrenched the sand dunes of his linen sheets where you've been left to rot in your own corrosive madness? His blankets disguised the ichor of your fractured veins with a baptized shade of ivory, but it was still there, lingering, much like the stench. The vulgar odor of you marinating in cushions reeking of your own screams couldn't be washed out, but maybe that was the kind of pillow talk that really got Jupiter going.

I don't blame you for being lured by a viper's forked tongue because that's how he intoxicates all his victims, and you and your immaculate heart are no different. But you know the hazards and you know the risks.

And yet you stay.

Others say you're bewitched, you call it love. But I know you better than they do, Venus.
I know it's because you can't live without him, or rather, he won't let you live without him. Because Jupiter is not the arm that protects you from the evils of this accursed realm.

He is a gun.