Stains of wine.

 

The stain isn’t real. It can’t be.

But then why does it spread?

Why does it crawl, dark and red, from the crease of my palm, winding its way through my veins like ivy, thick and suffocating? I wash my hands until the skin screams, rub until the surface peels back, exposing what lies beneath—but it never goes away.

It started as a smudge, faint, almost invisible, like a sin half-whispered into the night. I thought it would disappear if I ignored it. I thought it was nothing. But nothing doesn’t cling to you like this, doesn’t pulse beneath the surface, hot and alive. Nothing doesn’t whisper.

“You’re marked,” it says. “You can’t hide.”

I press my hands against my chest, fingers trembling, trying to choke the words out of me. But the stain is there too, spreading across my ribs, licking at my throat. It’s warm. It’s too warm. It feels like the weight of another body, heavy and insistent, pressing against mine in ways I’ve tried so hard to forget.

Or maybe... maybe I didn’t want to forget.

No. No, no, no. I’m good. I’m clean. I kneel in the dark, the cold stone biting into my skin, and I pray until my voice cracks. Please, I beg, please take it away. Make it stop. Make me better. But the stain only laughs. It knows better.

It knows me.

I stare at my reflection, and the stain stares back, a red smear across the curve of my collarbone, the hollow of my throat. My fingers twitch toward it, desperate to scrape it away, but the glass warps, twists, shifts until it isn’t me anymore.

It’s him.

His face, his lips, his eyes that lingered too long, burning through the thin walls I built around myself. He grins at me from the mirror, red dripping from his teeth, and my knees buckle.

“You remember, don’t you?” the stain says, curling around my neck like a lover’s kiss. “You wanted it.”

“No,” I whisper, shaking my head, but my voice wavers, cracks. Because maybe I did. Because maybe I still do.

The stain spreads further, wrapping around my chest, my hips, my legs, until I can’t tell where it ends and I begin. It’s inside me now, threading through my veins, spilling into my thoughts. It pulses with every beat of my heart, hot and sticky, and I can’t stop it. I don’t want to.

But I do.

But I don’t.

I sink to the floor, my hands clawing at my skin, desperate to feel something, anything, that isn’t this. My nails dig deep, and blood wells up beneath them, dark and red, just like the stain. It runs down my arms in thin, trembling streams, but even that isn’t enough. Even that feels like him.

The stain laughs again, louder this time, echoing in my ears. “You’re mine,” it says, and I believe it.

Because no matter how much I bleed, how much I pray, how much I break myself apart trying to scrape it away—

The red never fades.