Nicolás applies the antiseptic cream to my wounds like he applies oil to his scalp. Not even the corners of his eyes crinkle to suggest disgust at the burst blisters.

Scissors for clipping the gauze dwell on the kitchen table. One of us will inevitably reach for them. It's a trap. He'll stitch me up only to stab the scissors into my gut and cut me open. Everything will spill out. Everything bad in his life is your fault.

Maybe you should save him the trouble. Slit your own throat.

What if you already have? Can't you feel the sticky warmth of blood pour down your chest?

No, there isn't any blood. Except on my hands.

I could snip off every bit of crinkled skin from my palms, red and waxy like a tomato peel. If Nicolás makes an incision and boils my hand, then transfers it to a bowl of ice water, he could strip my skin off as easily, leave behind a granular and mealy cushion.

Would my scars be visible even then? Would he have to dig them out with the point of a potato peeler?

Once the cream is slugged on, thick to keep the skin from drying, Nicolás wraps my hand in gauze again. He covers my palm and all my fingers with the same long ribbon of bandaging with the technical skill afforded to him by every video on YouTube and enough experience to have tried all the possible methods.

Only once the final strip of tape secures the end of the gauze to my wrist, does his gaze climb to meet mine. I can read the question before he can say it and shake my head.

'No doctors.'

Nicolás nods, swallowing his arguments with the lump in his throat.

My stomach churns and I hunch. Horrified, I think I'm going to vomit on him but when I open my mouth, it's a sob that splats to the floor.

I'm too tired to resist, too tired to growl and bite. And so I cry.

Tears ooze out of my eyes so quickly that they're still hot when they collect on my chin. I have to yank air into my lungs between sobs. Each inhale stabs the back of my throat. Pain shoots into my joints from the force that jostles my skeleton.

The knobs of my spine press into my stretched skin as my head sinks lower. They try to escape their fleshy prison like massive termite nymphs. Fuck, do I wish they would. I wish I could reach back and rip the worm out, throw it onto the floor where it would scatter into pearly vertebrae.

On his knees on the kitchen floor in front of my chair, Nicolás tangles his fingers into each other to stop himself from reaching out. He's forced to make do with a voice like running water, cleansing and gentle, a purr beneath its flow. 'You're gonna be alright, Cece.'

I won't. Because I'm evil. And I'm too tired to wrestle it back anymore.

I tilt off the chair to collapse into him. In my oxygen deprivation, it feels less like falling and more like being lifted.

It takes Nicolás a moment before he wraps his arms around me to pull me closer. On the kitchen floor, he holds me like a child while I weep into his chest. I'm sure my teeth nick his throat, sure my claws pierce his shoulders, but Nicolás rocks me and sings a lullaby that isn't in English or Spanish.

As much as the language stumbles on his tongue and as little as I'm able to hear of it over the wailing that must be coming out of my own throat, the melody soothes at least the desire to rip every bone out of my body. It's only when the tethers of my mind have all been severed and I sink into mist that I realise it might be Japanese.

Nicolás somehow manages to carry me up the stairs and into my room without me killing him by accident or on purpose. I try to collapse into bed but he makes a valid point about the chains and studs probably not being very comfortable to sleep in. I can't hear his voice, I can't remember him speaking at all, as if he's telepathically communicating meanings to me.

I let him change me into pyjamas before he helps me into bed. He pulls the blanket up to my chin and...

            My throat is blocked by a wasp nest. Dry and coarse and hard to breathe through. My room is dark but even the light of the streetlamps sear my eyes when I dare to open them. Each blink is like dragging sandpaper over my cornea.

I find my phone from the dresser but the battery is out and all I see is my gaunt face reflected in the black mirror of the screen. The streetlight catches my piercings and the whites of my eyes.

I'm not entirely evil yet.

I cough. My lungs try to, anyway, but my muscles are so spent that it don't budge even a flake of the wasp nest.

Water. I need water.

I sit up and find Nicolás asleep on the floor. He got himself a pillow but otherwise, he's left to seek comfort from the scratchy carpet, still in his office clothes with his NutriLents lanyard around his neck.

I'm careful to lower my feet to the floor without touching him. I gather my blanket, step over him to the other side where I have more space, and spread it over him. I don't have the gentleness of touch that Nicolás has and it's only a testament to how badly I've exhausted him that he don't wake up.

Once in the toilet, I bend to get my mouth under (drown) the cold tap. Half of the water runs down my jaw (I could drown) but I don't pull away even when some trickles into the conch of my ear. It's minutes later when I'm hydrated, the wasp nest washed down to my stomach to leave behind rawness and swelling but no itch.

I straighten up, dry my face and the side of my neck. My eyes are red and puffy and my pillow has debossed creases into my cheeks, but my face is clean. Nicolás must have cleaned whatever was left of my eyeliner after I passed out...

My stomach growls.

Can I trust my trembling hands and half-dead brain to make toast without setting the whole house on fire? I guess I could eat it plain.

But I've barely made it halfway down the stairs when Nicolás's voice comes from my room. 'Cece?'

My name is a saw in his mouth, first a syllable cut toward his teeth, then one yanked back into his throat. It forks his tongue. He might choke on the blood.

I try to answer but I have no hope of raising my voice enough for him to hear it so I start to climb back up the stairs just as he bursts from my room.

He sighs when he sees me passably alive, panic unlatching from his shoulders to wait in the dark under my bed. Still, he rushes to the staircase to make sure I'm solid.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But as though I've shrunk inside my body and now stand, a toy soldier, on the back of my tongue, no matter how much I apologise, the sound clashes against my teeth. Never past my lips, it gets trapped in my skull and multiplies tenfold.

'I'm fine,' I finally manage to whisper.

I won't flinch if he reaches out to me now, I won't.

But he doesn't. I've flinched too many times.

For a heartbeat, he's frozen with fear. Then, as if it were never there, Nicolás chuckles.

'You as hungry as I am?'

I nod. I think my stomach might eat itself.

'I'm too fucking knackered to cook. And–' he checks his phone '–it's two a.m. What d'you say we order take away?'

Nicolás bounces down the stairs with a click of the seashells and beads in his locs. The darkness swallows him whole.

I follow only once the kitchen light severs the corridor. 'But it's two in the morning,' I whisper, my vocal cords still battered. 'What's open at two in the morning?'

Nicolás stares at me with genuine surprise, maybe even with a hint of ridicule. 'It's Friday. In Manchester. There are plenty of places open.'

He orders us vegan fish and chips from his favourite chip shop owned by some lesbian couple called Golda and Saanvi. Apparently, it's his go-to place with his mates on a night out.

I imagine them there, colourful and glittery. Nicolás is laughing. He shoves Caleb for whatever joke he has just made and the rest of his friends either double down or defend him. They wear halos of love along with all their opulence.

Then I imagine myself there with Diwa. Maybe even Annabella and Jeremy join, and Elliot, and a couple more faceless friends. Will I ever have a night out that isn't red and black and blue, that isn't cold and sharp and bloody?

When the food comes, Nicolás helps me cut my "fish" so I can eat the meal with a loosely held fork that won't damage my hands more. Once we've eaten, we crash into our beds, asleep before–