Page 120 of One Spicy Summer

We collide like animals–grunting, snarling, slamming into the side table. The lamp shatters to the ground. My fist catches Keifer in the jaw, but not before I pull out my knife and slice a crooked line across his arm, causing him to drop his own knife.

Blood sprays.

Neither of us flinch.

Keifer lunges this time, aiming low. I grab his wrist, twisting until bones pop. He doesn’t scream. Then, he bites my shoulder, hard.

I howl and slam him into the bathroom door. It cracks off the hinges.

Both of us stumble inside, slipping on a floor slick with old water and new blood.

Keifer gets hold of the knife. I reach for a shard of broken mirror already on the ground. For a second, we just stare, two shadows ginning through gore. Then we lunge again, hands, blades, teeth, anything that could tear the other apart.

I jam my knife toward Keifer’s neck. He catches my wrist. We freeze, locked in a dead man’s grip, breathing ragged, faces close again.

My smile twists. “You gonna cry when I gut you? Like I used to do in school?”

His eyes flare. He breaks the lock and punches me in the throat, a savage, choking blow. I gag and buckle, but keep laughing even as I crawl across the floor.

Keifer follows, bleeding, seething, knuckles raw. My hand shakes, whether from pain or fury, I don’t know. The neon light from outside blinked red through the bathroom window, bathing the cracked tiles in hellfire.

I turn, now holding a jagged piece of the broken mirror, glass glinting in my hand.

“Let’s finish it here, asshole.”

We lunge–glass, steel, fists, elbows.

No grace.

Just pain.

The fight is clumsy and brutal, all survival and hate.

Blood splatters the broken mirror. Keifer’s scream echoes off the tile, but I don’t stop swinging, not until the glass drops from my hand, not until both of us are on the floor gasping like animals in a slaughterhouse.

Silence, then.

The sound of rain outside.

The slow drip of a faucet.

Our blood mixing on the floor like spilled ink.

I look down at Keifer, still breathing, but barely.

“You done?” I ask, voice hoarse.

He blinks through the blood in his eyes. “You still don’t get it. This never ends.” The motel room feels too small for what had just happened.

Blood slicks the bathroom tiles. Keifer lays half-slumped against the wall, one eye swollen shut, ribs rising and falling with ragged effort. The fight had drained us both.

I stand over him, knife in hand, chest heaving, lips split. Keifer coughs–wet, wheezing. Blood dribbles down his chin.

Still grinning.

I say nothing. My hands are shaking. Not from fear. From everything else.

I said I would kill for my Little Hellion.

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