Post by Roxy Cotton on Aug 25, 2018 19:28:54 GMT -5
BLOOD IN THE CUT
August 21st, 2018 – Malibu
“Babe... babe... BABE... just relax, okay? Relax!”
Vinnie Lane follows his fuming fiancee across the kitchen, trailing further behind her as she marches through the room taking angry laps.
“You did your best! You were amazing out there! Just chill, dude... CALM DOWN!”
A sauce pan whizzes past the feathered blonde tresses of Vinnie as he just barely ducks his had out of the way. Instead, the pan rings like a cymbal as it slams into a wall corner, then clatters to the tile floor with a cacophony of metallic noises. Vinnie straightens up and smooths back the hot pink bandanna wrapped around his head, his eyes wide with shock.
“DUDE!”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Vinnie! News flash for you, never in the history of ever has it been a good idea to tell a woman to calm down!”
“I just thought...”
“No, you absolutely didn’t. You just thought you’d try to mansplain everything to me, as usual. ‘Oh Roxy, it’s alright, you’ll get another shot!’ or ‘Roxy, it’s cool, you can’t win them all!’ … I don’t want to hear that CRAP right now Vinnie! I want to find Maxine and fire her, shut off all of her credit lines, have her phone disconnected so she can stop tweeting like a braindead idiot, and see how she feels for letting me down AGAIN and making me lose AGAIN.”
“Let’s not be rash, babe... WHOA!”
A frying pan whips by like a frisbee, with Vinnie just barely ducking underneath its trajectory in time to escape a cookware-assisted concussion. The frying pan joins its long lost cousin the sauce pan o the kitchen floor as Vinnie once again looks like he’s seen a ghost.
“Dude come ON.”
“No, YOU come on, Vinnie! You think I’ve sacrificed the things I’ve sacrificed in the last few months to come up short? You think I abandoned the idea of a Co-op Title rematch, something one of my best friends would have LOVD for me to do, just so I could LOSE after months of planning and training? Do you know what I’ve done? Do you know what I’ve put myself through? All in preparation for last night... ALL... for NOTHING!”
Roxy turns and walks toward Vinnie as she shouts at him, standing on the opposite side of the counter island he’s leaned on. Though she gestures at her waist, signifying the title gold that isn’t there, she clutches at the amulet around her neck with its oddly illuminated gemstone pulsating at its middle like a bioluminescent heartbeat. Vinnie leans across the counter and reaches a hand out, brushing the necklace with on outstretched finger.
“Yeah dude. Trust me, I know what you’ve done. Or probably done. I hear about it almost daily from my people at work. Aidan Collins has started a god damn GoFundMe saying I need to raise ten grand to get my nuts back from something he calls your ‘cuck wallet.’ I know all about your work and your sacrifices, dude, and I’ve made plenty of my own too. I don’t even like to think of what you probably had to do with that gross zombie dude Necron... just thinking about it makes me want to hurl...”
“Oh Vinnie, stop it. He’s never touched me.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes, really. You think I would actually spread my legs for someone who looks like an extra from a post-apocalyptic AIDS documentary? Don’t get me wrong... I expected to have to get creative and find ways to keep from getting any further than second base... but it honestly never even came up. He wasn’t interested in those things. We just... talked.”
“Talked? With a frankenstein? What could he possibly have to say to someone like you?”
Roxy leans forward more, resting her ample bosom on her crossed forearms as she lifts on of her feet off the floor, slipping the stiletto off of her heel and letting it dangle from her pedicured toe as she muses.
"A lot! We talked about things he’s seen... the death, the war, the famine... he told me I remind of someone beautiful and powerful that he used to love, which is why he didn’t get angry when I pickpocketed him. In fact, h honestly seemed like he half expected it the whole time. He’s never really seemed surprised or unhappy about anything that’s happened, as if everything is exactly the way he wants it to be.”
Roxy continues to fidget with the amulet, turning and caressing it between her fingers as she speaks. After a moment, though, she begins to pull at it.
“Not that it fucking mattered... everything I planned. Everything I did. All of it was to get my hands on that UGWC Chaos Title, Vinnie! And everything went exactly right! I got the title away from Ava, who would have never given me a chance at it. I got into Necron’s head enough for him to lose the championship against Pierce, a much more inferior competitor than Necron himself. I wouldn’t have stood a chance in an actual match with Necron... look at him! He’s like a demon or something. So, I got it into Pierce’s hands and convinced Necron to let me get it back for him, which dummy Pierce was all too thrilled about because he knew he’d get slaughtered in a rematch. All that had to happen was for Pierce and I to go one on one. I HAD him, Vinnie! I know how to beat him! I did it twice before! If Maxine was there to make sure nothing stupid happened it would have been a slam dunk, but she had to go throw a hissy fit and stay with Kenzi like some sort of butthurt housewife who caught her man cheating. I’m so mad at her! I HATE HER!”
Roxy continues to struggle, pulling on the amulet and the ornate band holding it tight around her neck. The skin around her collarbone sticks to the metal of the pendant, almost as if some sort of glue were holding it.
“Do you not understand what this means for me now, Vin? I started having so many aggressive fantasies... I had ideas for matches to just keep getting more and more violent, more and more dangerous. I was going to give Pierce a rematch and make him do it in a ring surrounded by broken glass! I was going to do inferno matches, electrified cage matches, barbed wire matches... I asked the front office to book me in the scariest thing they could think of for Chill next week! Oh my God, Vinnie, they’re putting me on a scaffold! I don’t have the title, I can’t go up there! What if I get hurt? What if I fall? What if I DIE?”
Roxy, seemingly just realizing that her upcoming match for UGWC Chill was a frightening endeavor, begins to have wit panicky sobs. She rushes around the kitchen island and buries her face in Vinnie’s chest, reaching behind her neck to continue to fiddle with the necklace more, grabbing where the clasp was.
“Dude, you’re not gonna die...”
Vinnie embraces Roxy, holding her close to him and rubbing his hands up and down her shoulders in an effort to relax her.
“Like... is this chick you’re fighting better at scaffolds than you are? You’re like the LAW Chaos Champ for eternity, dude! You’ve been in hellacious battles before! Why are you so shook by this one? Who is it you’re facing?”
Roxy looks up at Vinnie’s face from his chest, shaking her head as her eyes glisten in lacrymal moisture. She wipes her face with the back of a hand before stepping away slightly and trying once more to detach the necklace from behind her neck.
“Annie? No, no Vinnie that’s not it at all. Annie Fugate is a nobody outside of her own overinflated ego and sense of self-importance. No one has heard of her outside her little circle of people and they all just keep blowing the same smoke up her ass so she buys into her own hype. I’m not worried one bit about Annie Fugate. I’m better than Annie Fugate... but Vinnie, I’m better than Travis Pierce too! I’m better than Kem Dynamo! But flukes happen. And if one happens at Chill, I could get seriously injured. It could end my career, to fall from something so high up! It doesn’t matter who it is up there with m, Vinnie, one wrong step and I could be a quadriplegic and spend the rest of my life shitting into a plastic bag. Or I could land on my head and get retarded, and spend the rest of my life cheering for Mizore Payne! OMG Vinnie what if I get super retarded and buy her merch??? Vinnie I’m scared!”
Roxy once again throws herself into Vinnie’s chest, nearly soaking through his Faster Pussycat tee shirt with tears and runny mascara. Finally, she composes herself enough to remember the necklace once again and she pulls away, turning around and lifting her blond hair in her hands to expose the nape of her neck.
“Can you please unclasp this stupid thing? I can’t get it. I want it off of me, I think I’m allergic to it. Probably cheap ass costume jewelry with ten carat plate. Ugh. I’ve been getting nauseous every night since I put it on and I don’t need it anymore anyway, this whole fucking thing was a failure. At least I won’t have to pretend to like that freak anymore.”
“See babe? Silver linings!”
Vinnie leans down and kisses the back of Roxy’s neck, making all the little hairs across her skin stand up on end as a shiver courses through her body. But then, Vinnie snaps his head back as if he’d caught an electric shock.
“Ow!”
“What is it?”
Vinnie puts a hand to his lip, and it comes away red. His lower lip bleeds from a cut right in the center of it. Quickly, he reaches for a paper towel on the nearby kitchen island and tears a piece off, pressing the tiny dot of paper to the wound like someone who’d cut themselves shaving.
“A cut my lip on that fucking thing! Okay babe, let’s get that ugly necklace off of you...
Vinnie goes back to the band behind Roxy’s neck, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in concentration as he focuses on the jewelry.
“Here we go... just got to... um... huh... weird...”
“What’s weird?”
“Babe, there’s no clasp here anywhere. It’s just a solid band.”
“What? Vinnie don’t be stupid, how do you think I got it on? I told you before you need to get some fucking glasses... old man.”
Vinnie scowls as Roxy coquettishly giggles and rubs her butt into his crotch. The flirtation goes ignored, however, as Vinnie continues to focus on the back of Roxy’s neck.
“Dude I don’t know how you got it on, but more importantly I don’t know how to get it off... there’s NO clip back here, dude! And it’s super tight, I can barely get my finger underneath it. There’s no way it’s coming over your head!”
“Oh my god Vinnie you’re useless...”
Roxy steps away and grabs a steak knife from the wooden block on the countertop. She hands it to Vinnie and turns around again.
“Cut it off.”
“Huh???”
“Just... CUT IT OFF! NOW!”
“Okay! Jeez!”
Vinnie takes the steak knife in his hand and gingerly slides it between the skin of Roxy’s neck and the thick band of Necron’s choker. The cold of the blade once again pimples Roxy’s flesh with goose bumps, and she shivers as Vinnie carefully begins to saw back and forth.
“It isn’t cutting, dude.”
“Just DO it Vinnie. Like ripping off a band aid. Hurry up!”
“Fuck.... fine! Count of three, okay?”
“Whatever.”
“One... two... fuckfuckfuck... THREE!”
Vinnie rips his arm backward as if he were starting a lawn mower. Roxy’s eyes bulge out as Vinnie nearly loses his footing from the inertia.
“OWWW! What the FUCK!?“
“Oh my god... dude are you okay?”
“NO you fucking jackass, you just cut me!”
Roxy brings her fingers away from the back of her neck, showing that they are stained with blood. Her index and middle finger are coated completely.
“I swear I didn’t! Rox, I had the blade turned away from your neck, I swear! Look at this!”
Vinnie holds up the knife, which is also painted with a slick sheen of Roxy’s lifeblood... and he sees right away that something is terribly wrong.
“What the... dude... the knife... the knife is all fucked up and broken... how? How’s that even possible?”
In fact, the serations from the steak knife are completely gone, leaving just a smooth, dull blade. Roxy looks closer at her bloody hand and then holds it up to Vinnie.
“Is that... is that what I think?”
Vin takes her hand and looks closely at the bloodstained fingers... and sees a dozen tiny metallic triangles stuck to the bloody skin like glitter. The teeth from the knife sheared off completely as he attempted to cut the necklace’s band.
“Dude... that’s so fuckin’ WEIRD. What the fuck do we do now?”
Roxy’s face falls into a serious expression, but she doesn’t take long to come up with an answer.
“I think... I have to talk to Necron.”
Later That Night
"No, Vinnie, it’s fine... just let me have some time to myself okay? I need to mentally prepare myself for all of this.”
Roxy stands in the doorway of her bedroom, dressed for sleep in her sheerest purple negligee.
“Okay babe... that’s cool. I’ll come up to bed in a few hours, your mom wanted me to have a drink with her at some point while she was staying with us anyway.”
“Ugh. Vinnie...”
“Rox, don’t worry... I’m just being polite. I’m one hundred percent on your side here.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. Duh.”
Vinnie kisses Roxy deeply, cupping the back of her head and brushing against the bandage on th back of her neck.
“Just get some rest, babe... sorry again about the cut...”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, but... I dunno. Maybe it was. I don’t think...”
Roxy cuts him off with another kiss, and Vin relaxes, letting his body melt against hers and returning the passion with fervor. Roxy eventually has to detach herself from him and take a step back.
“Not now, Vinnie... later, okay?”
“Cool... just... get some rest. Clear your head. I’ll be up soon, okay?”
“Okay. See you soon baby.”
She closes the door with a silly little wave, and then walks to her bed with a million thoughts swirling in her brain like hurricane force winds. Maybe Vinnie was right, she thought. Maybe she had nothing to worry about with the scaffold match. She’d be fine. But the doubts kept popping up as she laid back on top of the comforter and squeezed her eyes shut against the tumult of her overactive imagination.
“Hmmm... get your mind off of it, Roxy...”
She muttered to herself as the visions of career ending injury kept raising their heads like a hack-a-mole game. Then, her eyes popped open.
“Oh. Hello there.”
Looking up at the ceiling she smiled, staring at the artistic mural she had commissioned a few weeks prior. Right above her bed, in vivid color and detail, was a wall to wall depiction of one of her favorite sights... the heroic and muscular Captain 80s, riding a Pegasus, with his fists filled with thunderbolts, vanquishing various other UGWC competitors such as Kem Dynamo and Eden Morgan. He is fully nude on the winged horse’s back, with an equally naked Roxy Cotton painted behind him, her arms wrapped around his supple waist and her head resting on his shoulder. Good thing Vinnie spent most of his time in bed looking down.
“Captain 80s... I wish you were there for Chill. I know nothing would happen to me if you were there...”
Roxy closed her eyes again then as her hands found the hem of her negligee and lifted it ever so slightly above the curve of her inner thighs. She bit her lip gently as she imagined different scenes once more, this time with the Captain saving her over and over. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself slipping from high atop the arena, falling from the scaffold hundreds of feet in the air... but before she could hit the ground, the strong, vascular arms of Captain 80s caught her in a firm but gentle embrace.
“Mmmm...”
Her fingers moved in slow circles between her legs as her breathing rate increased to a rapid pace. The comforter beneath her shifted as her free hand clutched at it, squeezing the fabric in a fist as her fingers danced quicker and quicker, around and around.
“Oh...”
She felt it coming like a storm. Her mind was afire with hallucinations of Captain 80s rescuing her over and over, his strong arms protecting her from all manner of attacks and endangerments. After he rescued her from a set of railroad tracks she had been tied to just in time to avoid being dissected by a charging locomotive, she imagined herself wrapping her long, tan legs around his midsection and dragging his body closer and closer to her, pulling him in, filling herself up with him.
“Ah!”
The moment was at hand... and just as the point of no return passed, the bedroom door flew open and Roxy’s mother Amanda stood in the doorway, looking back oveer her shoulder to finish some unkown argument with Vinnie.
“I’ll talk to my daughter any time I want, now... OH MY GOD!”
“MOM! NO! GET OUT!”
“Babe, what.... oh shit!”
It was too late to stop anything. Roxy had stepped over the precipice and what was set in motion had to commence. Vinnie, being well aware of Roxy’s trajectory and capabilities, threw himself aside as if another pot or pan was headed his way just as the kegel muscles in Roxy’s downtown area contracted. Unfortunately, Amanda was too slow and too unaware.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Roxy’s voice was dragged out and distorted as if by slow motion in her own ears. She watched in horror as an arc of fluid launched itself from her bed and splashed across her mother’s face. Amanda, shocked silent for once, stood wordlessly and shook with panic. Vinnie stayed on his knees and looked back and forth between the two women until Amanda fled, hurrying away from the doorway leaving only echoes of footsteps as she stormed down the stairwell.
“Dude...”
Roxy’s face reddened until she looked not entirely unlike a stop sign. She sat up on the bed and bundled the lace of her nightie in her hands between he knees, completely humiliated.
“That... was... AWESOME!”
“Babe... babe... BABE... just relax, okay? Relax!”
Vinnie Lane follows his fuming fiancee across the kitchen, trailing further behind her as she marches through the room taking angry laps.
“You did your best! You were amazing out there! Just chill, dude... CALM DOWN!”
A sauce pan whizzes past the feathered blonde tresses of Vinnie as he just barely ducks his had out of the way. Instead, the pan rings like a cymbal as it slams into a wall corner, then clatters to the tile floor with a cacophony of metallic noises. Vinnie straightens up and smooths back the hot pink bandanna wrapped around his head, his eyes wide with shock.
“DUDE!”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Vinnie! News flash for you, never in the history of ever has it been a good idea to tell a woman to calm down!”
“I just thought...”
“No, you absolutely didn’t. You just thought you’d try to mansplain everything to me, as usual. ‘Oh Roxy, it’s alright, you’ll get another shot!’ or ‘Roxy, it’s cool, you can’t win them all!’ … I don’t want to hear that CRAP right now Vinnie! I want to find Maxine and fire her, shut off all of her credit lines, have her phone disconnected so she can stop tweeting like a braindead idiot, and see how she feels for letting me down AGAIN and making me lose AGAIN.”
“Let’s not be rash, babe... WHOA!”
A frying pan whips by like a frisbee, with Vinnie just barely ducking underneath its trajectory in time to escape a cookware-assisted concussion. The frying pan joins its long lost cousin the sauce pan o the kitchen floor as Vinnie once again looks like he’s seen a ghost.
“Dude come ON.”
“No, YOU come on, Vinnie! You think I’ve sacrificed the things I’ve sacrificed in the last few months to come up short? You think I abandoned the idea of a Co-op Title rematch, something one of my best friends would have LOVD for me to do, just so I could LOSE after months of planning and training? Do you know what I’ve done? Do you know what I’ve put myself through? All in preparation for last night... ALL... for NOTHING!”
Roxy turns and walks toward Vinnie as she shouts at him, standing on the opposite side of the counter island he’s leaned on. Though she gestures at her waist, signifying the title gold that isn’t there, she clutches at the amulet around her neck with its oddly illuminated gemstone pulsating at its middle like a bioluminescent heartbeat. Vinnie leans across the counter and reaches a hand out, brushing the necklace with on outstretched finger.
“Yeah dude. Trust me, I know what you’ve done. Or probably done. I hear about it almost daily from my people at work. Aidan Collins has started a god damn GoFundMe saying I need to raise ten grand to get my nuts back from something he calls your ‘cuck wallet.’ I know all about your work and your sacrifices, dude, and I’ve made plenty of my own too. I don’t even like to think of what you probably had to do with that gross zombie dude Necron... just thinking about it makes me want to hurl...”
“Oh Vinnie, stop it. He’s never touched me.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes, really. You think I would actually spread my legs for someone who looks like an extra from a post-apocalyptic AIDS documentary? Don’t get me wrong... I expected to have to get creative and find ways to keep from getting any further than second base... but it honestly never even came up. He wasn’t interested in those things. We just... talked.”
“Talked? With a frankenstein? What could he possibly have to say to someone like you?”
Roxy leans forward more, resting her ample bosom on her crossed forearms as she lifts on of her feet off the floor, slipping the stiletto off of her heel and letting it dangle from her pedicured toe as she muses.
"A lot! We talked about things he’s seen... the death, the war, the famine... he told me I remind of someone beautiful and powerful that he used to love, which is why he didn’t get angry when I pickpocketed him. In fact, h honestly seemed like he half expected it the whole time. He’s never really seemed surprised or unhappy about anything that’s happened, as if everything is exactly the way he wants it to be.”
Roxy continues to fidget with the amulet, turning and caressing it between her fingers as she speaks. After a moment, though, she begins to pull at it.
“Not that it fucking mattered... everything I planned. Everything I did. All of it was to get my hands on that UGWC Chaos Title, Vinnie! And everything went exactly right! I got the title away from Ava, who would have never given me a chance at it. I got into Necron’s head enough for him to lose the championship against Pierce, a much more inferior competitor than Necron himself. I wouldn’t have stood a chance in an actual match with Necron... look at him! He’s like a demon or something. So, I got it into Pierce’s hands and convinced Necron to let me get it back for him, which dummy Pierce was all too thrilled about because he knew he’d get slaughtered in a rematch. All that had to happen was for Pierce and I to go one on one. I HAD him, Vinnie! I know how to beat him! I did it twice before! If Maxine was there to make sure nothing stupid happened it would have been a slam dunk, but she had to go throw a hissy fit and stay with Kenzi like some sort of butthurt housewife who caught her man cheating. I’m so mad at her! I HATE HER!”
Roxy continues to struggle, pulling on the amulet and the ornate band holding it tight around her neck. The skin around her collarbone sticks to the metal of the pendant, almost as if some sort of glue were holding it.
“Do you not understand what this means for me now, Vin? I started having so many aggressive fantasies... I had ideas for matches to just keep getting more and more violent, more and more dangerous. I was going to give Pierce a rematch and make him do it in a ring surrounded by broken glass! I was going to do inferno matches, electrified cage matches, barbed wire matches... I asked the front office to book me in the scariest thing they could think of for Chill next week! Oh my God, Vinnie, they’re putting me on a scaffold! I don’t have the title, I can’t go up there! What if I get hurt? What if I fall? What if I DIE?”
Roxy, seemingly just realizing that her upcoming match for UGWC Chill was a frightening endeavor, begins to have wit panicky sobs. She rushes around the kitchen island and buries her face in Vinnie’s chest, reaching behind her neck to continue to fiddle with the necklace more, grabbing where the clasp was.
“Dude, you’re not gonna die...”
Vinnie embraces Roxy, holding her close to him and rubbing his hands up and down her shoulders in an effort to relax her.
“Like... is this chick you’re fighting better at scaffolds than you are? You’re like the LAW Chaos Champ for eternity, dude! You’ve been in hellacious battles before! Why are you so shook by this one? Who is it you’re facing?”
Roxy looks up at Vinnie’s face from his chest, shaking her head as her eyes glisten in lacrymal moisture. She wipes her face with the back of a hand before stepping away slightly and trying once more to detach the necklace from behind her neck.
“Annie? No, no Vinnie that’s not it at all. Annie Fugate is a nobody outside of her own overinflated ego and sense of self-importance. No one has heard of her outside her little circle of people and they all just keep blowing the same smoke up her ass so she buys into her own hype. I’m not worried one bit about Annie Fugate. I’m better than Annie Fugate... but Vinnie, I’m better than Travis Pierce too! I’m better than Kem Dynamo! But flukes happen. And if one happens at Chill, I could get seriously injured. It could end my career, to fall from something so high up! It doesn’t matter who it is up there with m, Vinnie, one wrong step and I could be a quadriplegic and spend the rest of my life shitting into a plastic bag. Or I could land on my head and get retarded, and spend the rest of my life cheering for Mizore Payne! OMG Vinnie what if I get super retarded and buy her merch??? Vinnie I’m scared!”
Roxy once again throws herself into Vinnie’s chest, nearly soaking through his Faster Pussycat tee shirt with tears and runny mascara. Finally, she composes herself enough to remember the necklace once again and she pulls away, turning around and lifting her blond hair in her hands to expose the nape of her neck.
“Can you please unclasp this stupid thing? I can’t get it. I want it off of me, I think I’m allergic to it. Probably cheap ass costume jewelry with ten carat plate. Ugh. I’ve been getting nauseous every night since I put it on and I don’t need it anymore anyway, this whole fucking thing was a failure. At least I won’t have to pretend to like that freak anymore.”
“See babe? Silver linings!”
Vinnie leans down and kisses the back of Roxy’s neck, making all the little hairs across her skin stand up on end as a shiver courses through her body. But then, Vinnie snaps his head back as if he’d caught an electric shock.
“Ow!”
“What is it?”
Vinnie puts a hand to his lip, and it comes away red. His lower lip bleeds from a cut right in the center of it. Quickly, he reaches for a paper towel on the nearby kitchen island and tears a piece off, pressing the tiny dot of paper to the wound like someone who’d cut themselves shaving.
“A cut my lip on that fucking thing! Okay babe, let’s get that ugly necklace off of you...
Vinnie goes back to the band behind Roxy’s neck, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in concentration as he focuses on the jewelry.
“Here we go... just got to... um... huh... weird...”
“What’s weird?”
“Babe, there’s no clasp here anywhere. It’s just a solid band.”
“What? Vinnie don’t be stupid, how do you think I got it on? I told you before you need to get some fucking glasses... old man.”
Vinnie scowls as Roxy coquettishly giggles and rubs her butt into his crotch. The flirtation goes ignored, however, as Vinnie continues to focus on the back of Roxy’s neck.
“Dude I don’t know how you got it on, but more importantly I don’t know how to get it off... there’s NO clip back here, dude! And it’s super tight, I can barely get my finger underneath it. There’s no way it’s coming over your head!”
“Oh my god Vinnie you’re useless...”
Roxy steps away and grabs a steak knife from the wooden block on the countertop. She hands it to Vinnie and turns around again.
“Cut it off.”
“Huh???”
“Just... CUT IT OFF! NOW!”
“Okay! Jeez!”
Vinnie takes the steak knife in his hand and gingerly slides it between the skin of Roxy’s neck and the thick band of Necron’s choker. The cold of the blade once again pimples Roxy’s flesh with goose bumps, and she shivers as Vinnie carefully begins to saw back and forth.
“It isn’t cutting, dude.”
“Just DO it Vinnie. Like ripping off a band aid. Hurry up!”
“Fuck.... fine! Count of three, okay?”
“Whatever.”
“One... two... fuckfuckfuck... THREE!”
Vinnie rips his arm backward as if he were starting a lawn mower. Roxy’s eyes bulge out as Vinnie nearly loses his footing from the inertia.
“OWWW! What the FUCK!?“
“Oh my god... dude are you okay?”
“NO you fucking jackass, you just cut me!”
Roxy brings her fingers away from the back of her neck, showing that they are stained with blood. Her index and middle finger are coated completely.
“I swear I didn’t! Rox, I had the blade turned away from your neck, I swear! Look at this!”
Vinnie holds up the knife, which is also painted with a slick sheen of Roxy’s lifeblood... and he sees right away that something is terribly wrong.
“What the... dude... the knife... the knife is all fucked up and broken... how? How’s that even possible?”
In fact, the serations from the steak knife are completely gone, leaving just a smooth, dull blade. Roxy looks closer at her bloody hand and then holds it up to Vinnie.
“Is that... is that what I think?”
Vin takes her hand and looks closely at the bloodstained fingers... and sees a dozen tiny metallic triangles stuck to the bloody skin like glitter. The teeth from the knife sheared off completely as he attempted to cut the necklace’s band.
“Dude... that’s so fuckin’ WEIRD. What the fuck do we do now?”
Roxy’s face falls into a serious expression, but she doesn’t take long to come up with an answer.
“I think... I have to talk to Necron.”
Later That Night
"No, Vinnie, it’s fine... just let me have some time to myself okay? I need to mentally prepare myself for all of this.”
Roxy stands in the doorway of her bedroom, dressed for sleep in her sheerest purple negligee.
“Okay babe... that’s cool. I’ll come up to bed in a few hours, your mom wanted me to have a drink with her at some point while she was staying with us anyway.”
“Ugh. Vinnie...”
“Rox, don’t worry... I’m just being polite. I’m one hundred percent on your side here.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. Duh.”
Vinnie kisses Roxy deeply, cupping the back of her head and brushing against the bandage on th back of her neck.
“Just get some rest, babe... sorry again about the cut...”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, but... I dunno. Maybe it was. I don’t think...”
Roxy cuts him off with another kiss, and Vin relaxes, letting his body melt against hers and returning the passion with fervor. Roxy eventually has to detach herself from him and take a step back.
“Not now, Vinnie... later, okay?”
“Cool... just... get some rest. Clear your head. I’ll be up soon, okay?”
“Okay. See you soon baby.”
She closes the door with a silly little wave, and then walks to her bed with a million thoughts swirling in her brain like hurricane force winds. Maybe Vinnie was right, she thought. Maybe she had nothing to worry about with the scaffold match. She’d be fine. But the doubts kept popping up as she laid back on top of the comforter and squeezed her eyes shut against the tumult of her overactive imagination.
“Hmmm... get your mind off of it, Roxy...”
She muttered to herself as the visions of career ending injury kept raising their heads like a hack-a-mole game. Then, her eyes popped open.
“Oh. Hello there.”
Looking up at the ceiling she smiled, staring at the artistic mural she had commissioned a few weeks prior. Right above her bed, in vivid color and detail, was a wall to wall depiction of one of her favorite sights... the heroic and muscular Captain 80s, riding a Pegasus, with his fists filled with thunderbolts, vanquishing various other UGWC competitors such as Kem Dynamo and Eden Morgan. He is fully nude on the winged horse’s back, with an equally naked Roxy Cotton painted behind him, her arms wrapped around his supple waist and her head resting on his shoulder. Good thing Vinnie spent most of his time in bed looking down.
“Captain 80s... I wish you were there for Chill. I know nothing would happen to me if you were there...”
Roxy closed her eyes again then as her hands found the hem of her negligee and lifted it ever so slightly above the curve of her inner thighs. She bit her lip gently as she imagined different scenes once more, this time with the Captain saving her over and over. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself slipping from high atop the arena, falling from the scaffold hundreds of feet in the air... but before she could hit the ground, the strong, vascular arms of Captain 80s caught her in a firm but gentle embrace.
“Mmmm...”
Her fingers moved in slow circles between her legs as her breathing rate increased to a rapid pace. The comforter beneath her shifted as her free hand clutched at it, squeezing the fabric in a fist as her fingers danced quicker and quicker, around and around.
“Oh...”
She felt it coming like a storm. Her mind was afire with hallucinations of Captain 80s rescuing her over and over, his strong arms protecting her from all manner of attacks and endangerments. After he rescued her from a set of railroad tracks she had been tied to just in time to avoid being dissected by a charging locomotive, she imagined herself wrapping her long, tan legs around his midsection and dragging his body closer and closer to her, pulling him in, filling herself up with him.
“Ah!”
The moment was at hand... and just as the point of no return passed, the bedroom door flew open and Roxy’s mother Amanda stood in the doorway, looking back oveer her shoulder to finish some unkown argument with Vinnie.
“I’ll talk to my daughter any time I want, now... OH MY GOD!”
“MOM! NO! GET OUT!”
“Babe, what.... oh shit!”
It was too late to stop anything. Roxy had stepped over the precipice and what was set in motion had to commence. Vinnie, being well aware of Roxy’s trajectory and capabilities, threw himself aside as if another pot or pan was headed his way just as the kegel muscles in Roxy’s downtown area contracted. Unfortunately, Amanda was too slow and too unaware.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Roxy’s voice was dragged out and distorted as if by slow motion in her own ears. She watched in horror as an arc of fluid launched itself from her bed and splashed across her mother’s face. Amanda, shocked silent for once, stood wordlessly and shook with panic. Vinnie stayed on his knees and looked back and forth between the two women until Amanda fled, hurrying away from the doorway leaving only echoes of footsteps as she stormed down the stairwell.
“Dude...”
Roxy’s face reddened until she looked not entirely unlike a stop sign. She sat up on the bed and bundled the lace of her nightie in her hands between he knees, completely humiliated.
“That... was... AWESOME!”
~ THE END ~