When you look at him, he can feel his veins burn up, he can feel them grow weak as his blood grows stale. He can feel you swallowing him, bit by bit, throwing yourself into the little crevices inside of him and swallowing everything he loves about who he is.
        When you taste him, he can feel it come back, the littlest bit, like perhaps your tongue in places it doesn't belong can give him the worth you took from him.
         When he tastes you, you're bitter, like lost memories and anger, like a thirst for vengeance and an insatiable desire. You taste like everything you promised you would not become.
         You taste of the cheap beer you used to steal from insecure joints in town, of those beautiful few moments when you would sit on a greasy man's lap and he would tip back your head, dripping something expensive and tangy down your throat from his flask, before he grabbed your hips and thrust up.
         You taste like the first cigarette you smoked, like a drag and vague disgust as you felt salty tears dripping on your tongue, and pure ecstasy as you realized you were burning it. You would never be weak again. So you cough, and you take another drag.
         You taste of heroin, that time you shot yourself up again at 5 AM, when everyone was waking up and you felt that a cuppa would do you nothing. You still felt nothing, but a slight buzz, so you did it again. You threw away half of the money you saved up to pay up your student loans that day.
          You taste of an OD, of your fingers scrabbling for purchase on the last two pills in the bottle, looking at the small pile of caplets you had set in your ashtray for lack of better space. You taste of the twenty-two glasses of water you have set up, for the fifty-nine pills you'd set out to swallow. You taste of the last ones never making it before the darkness ate you, as you eat him.
          You taste of weakness, of thousands of up and coming supernovas, of such vulnerability, as pressure built up inside of you, as it became easier and easier to smile and joke because you knew time is different for you and you'd be gone before you knew yesterday had left you stranded.
          You taste of a lost youth, of anger and selflessness so profound to you, that others regarded it as dramatic. You taste of the ways a thousand people call you the king of scenes, of whoring for attention and being far too great at it. You taste of being skilled at always getting what you want.
          You know you never get what you want, because you want him. Him, he who lies at the bottom of the bottle when it looks empty, he who sits in the warps of your reflections in broken bottles. He who lies in the rusty tip if your syringe.
          You want him terribly, and you take him, but all he can taste of you is sorrow so deep and full that a noose could never justify it, that a blade was too comfortable to offer hope. He tastes in you the knowledge that you get everything you want, and if all you want is to scratch at the bottom of the bottle and stare out blankly, because it is courage to swallow pill by pill and watch your life be swallowed by caplets that your doctor gave to you in hopes that you would be responsible and that you wanted to get better.
        You did. But now you don't, you couldn't. Because you always get what you want, but so does he, and he's far better at this game than you.
        And although he's on his knees tonight, you've always been the one bowing