Sex On Fire

I’m a bit late with this story for Vic’s Friday Fictional but I finished it today so thought I might as well post it.

The prompt was sex red female.

Conjures up all sorts of images, doesn’t it?

There are times you should stay and times you should leave. Cora knew that. Everyone did. It was a form of cowardice to stay when she knew what the score was. She knew it, but she just couldn’t walk out the door.

Ronnie couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, Cora didn’t like to put it so crudely, but there it was, she had to put it out there just like Ronnie’s dick – out there, pantless, swinging in the breeze.

So many women had come forward claiming to have slept with Ronnie that Cora feared he had actually forgotten how to do up a zipper. He had certainly never learned self-restraint.

It didn’t help that everyone she knew expected her relationship with Ronnie to fail. Everyone.

He’s a rockstar, they said. One of those self indulgent celebrities. He has 4 million followers on Twitter who all want to hear about his latest conquest. He is supposed to have bedded more women than Julio Iglesias and Bret Michaels put together. Why are you even entertaining the idea of being with him? You’re just gonna get hurt.

You’re just gonna get hurt.

The thing is, the thing that everyone didn’t know was, number one, Cora was used to getting hurt.

And number two, she didn’t love Ronnie at all.

Not in the slightest.

Her liaison with him was tactical.

Self-protective.

When you didn’t love someone it didn’t matter how they acted. They couldn’t hurt you deep in your heart where it counted.

Cora felt the humiliation a bit. The press rammed it home so much she felt like a bit of an idiot. But she needed the humiliation to dampen down the anger.

The anger that followed her as if it was her second self.

When Cora was a kid she was burned in a fire. A man was trying to hurt her. A bad man. Making her do things she didn’t want to do.

Cora fought him almost to the death. He would not take away her soul. No one would take that from her.

Everyone, the police, her mother, her teachers, thought the man had started the fire, had planned to burn Cora to death because she wouldn’t do what he wanted.

Cora knew something they didn’t. That she would never tell them.

She was the one who had started the fire. She had stood back as it filled the room and watched the man burn to death.

He screamed at her to help him and she stood back and laughed, actually laughed. Like a devil child.

In the morning her eyes were red. Rubies looking back at her in the mirror.

Cora liked fire. The heat, the pain, the red hot colour that overwhelmed every sense you had. The rage of it filled her head, her heart, her mouth. She saw it everywhere, waiting to break free. Looking at her.

Since the day the bad man had died she had fought to stop herself from starting more fires, from watching the world burn. That’s what she wanted deep in her heart. To watch it all burn.

There was only one human act that came close to  starting a fire – the pulsing, undulating heat of it.

Raw. Unadorned. Unencumbered.

Sex.

As Cora grew she craved sex. Besides starting fires it was all she thought about.

But her sexual acts never ended well.

You can’t start a fire without a spark. Cora discovered that too late.

In the middle of the sexual act when she was transformed – not ascending in ecstasy, Cora never ascended; but descending, down, down deep into the black and the dark where the fires deep in the earth’s entrails smouldered – she couldn’t control herself. She couldn’t stop the spark from turning to fire.

The men burned. From the inside out. Turning and writhing on the bed, Cora’s bed, like a pig on a spit.

She couldn’t save them. The fire ran too deep. The lust and the heat and the rage rendered her selfish, a slave to her own needs and desires. She didn’t want it to stop.

Afterwards, she gathered up the men’s personal effects and put them in the freezer. She didn’t eat ice cream anymore, there was no place to keep it cold, the freezer was full of wallets, watches and mobile phones.

She liked ice cream, it was the only thing that turned her eyes back to their natural colour.

Cora knew she had to stop the killing. So she made a vow to herself that she would never have sex again.

She stuck to the vow for many years.

But after a while the fire began to singe her feet, scorching the pavement as she walked.

Soon she was starting fires in her sleep. She burned down three apartments in a row. She took to sleeping in abandoned car lots, completely made of concrete where the fire couldn’t take hold. It worked for a while but it didn’t stop her from shaking uncontrollably, sparks flying from her fingertips as she quivered with unsatisfied lust.

One night she met Ronnie in a bar. She didn’t know who he was but he had charisma – she had to give him that. Charisma and an unmitigated coldness. Ronnie was a little dead inside. His heart was soaking in icy water. He would never surrender to her because everything, every thought he had ever had in his life was about him. He didn’t care about people dying in floods in Pakistan or the Japanese hunting whales or children in Africa still contracting preventable diseases.

I don’t give a fuck, he said.

And he didn’t.

Ronnie only cared about Ronnie.

It was exactly what Cora needed.

Sex with Ronnie was predictable, unremarkable. He filmed it every time so he could watch how good his pecs and butt looked afterwards.

I am God’s gift to the female race, he said. I am so hot it blows my mind.

Cora didn’t care. Ronnie served a purpose, satisying her needs, quenching the fire at her feet.

She would stay with him as long as she could. No matter what anyone thought.

You are God’s gift to the female race, Ronnie, she whispered as the sun came up in the morning blazing in her face like a kiss of fire.

You are stopping me from burning their men to death one by one.

Cora smiled as the sunlight danced on her mirror. Tiny crystal orbs of yellow and orange.

And red. The most glorious red.

Just like her eyes.

[Image: Lady In Red by Fastworks at Deviant Art.]