i. you gotta have fun
She goes out on Saturday nights, taking in one after another, and leaves them in her high-heeled wake. It disturbs the neighbors when she leaves them one by one, cardboard cutouts of lonely men left by her wayside. They call out to her on busy streets, and she flips them off as she walks on by, picking and choosing at bars, cafés, clubs, ballparks—wherever and whenever she wants.
She’ll take them home by the collar of their shirts, tattooed kisses down their necks and whisky-breathed bites. The sheets are tangled in the early morning, snaked around their legs in a tug-of-war with the bed. There are marks on her back and blood on the sheets.
Afterwards, she smokes on the balcony.
•••
They call her Heartbreaker back at home when she’s wrapped up in Mama’s shawl, singing by the campfire on summer nights. Her brother will pat her arm and ask who she’s corralled in this time, and she’ll lean back with her grin as wide as the state of Texas.
“Why?” Mama asks when they’re alone. The boys went to bed two hours ago, and they’re sitting on a log, thigh to thigh, the embers burning low.
“They love a dangerous girl,” she tells her secretly, and she turns back to the fire.
•••
She feels the city air touch her lips, and she rubs the scratches on her arms left over from another conquest, the sting a welcome distraction from the person in the bed across the hotel room. The smoke trails out into the cold night, and she interrupts the wisps with her fingertips, calculating when she should head home.
He call out to her in the dark.
She leaves with a bottle in her palm.
ii. just don’t get attached to somebody you could lose
She’s twenty-three when she breaks the bottle on the floor on her bathroom, realizing too late that her current target has hit a little too close the home in her chest. He’s in the back bedroom of a hotel room she rented late notice, with her rings on the bedside table and her bra on the floor.
He’s playing some shit song on the radio, too loud for comfort, and it grates on her frazzled nerves.
She beats her hand against the mirror and nearly shatters the glass.
•••
She found him in a bar at eleven o’clock on a Saturday two months and forever ago, and he smelled of champagne and roses.
He was on leave, and told her as much as she sidled up to him with manicured nails and a promise of more than just a kiss. A little flirting here and there never hurt anyone, and she tapped out staccato notes on the countertop as he talked about the war.
She asked him to tell her more.
He gave in and paid the bill.
•••
She told him she didn’t love him two months later.
It was a lie, and it wasn’t.
iii. wear your heart on your cheek, but never on your sleeve
There was a dingy tattoo parlor tucked away in a back alley of the city that she went to three years ago. She got a black heart tattooed on her cheek, a permanent reminder of her younger days, pick lipstick stains on her coffee cups.
When she takes out another guy from the café across the street, he swipes his finger across it while they’re in bed afterward. His hand lingers too long, and then falls on the sheets.
He doesn’t ask, but the next one does.
“Heart on the cheek, not on the sleeve,” she repeats like a mantra, whisper-words soft against his skin.
“You wear it like a battle wound.”
•••
Instead of calling Mama, she stares out the window of her third-rate apartment with her arms wrapped around her legs. Hot cocoa sits beside her on the table, steaming and fresh, while she wiles away the hours counting the stars above her.
She touches her cheek out of habit.
It’s cold.
iv. gotta be looking pure
She kisses them goodbye at the door, now, heart stopped in her throat.
They don’t coerce her inside, her smile tight-lipped and sinister with a touch of angel between her lips. She pushes them away with a flutter of lashes and a nip. They stand stop motion on the porch, silhouetted against a red brick backdrop, begging for more. She dips her head down and speaks soft, words caught in her throat like a trap.
It gets them going long enough for her to sink her teeth in.
•••
They tell her she’s Heartbreaker, ten studded rings and card up her sleeve.
They tell her she’s Heartbreaker, high-heels sharp with a penchant for carnage.
They tell her she’s Heartbreaker, tip-toed kisses on the balcony.
But she’s a fake, and she knows it.
[2015]