"We're just gonna take your blood pressure and temperature," the frumpy, crows-footed nurse explains to me, even though I'm well aware of the intake process at the doctor's.
I'm wearing my black leather jacket, and underneath, my Marilyn Manson's Rape of the World Tour t-shirt. The sleeves are longer than some of my other shirts - but not long enough to hide the three and a half inch-long scar snaking up my bicep from the inside of my elbow. It just happens to be on my left arm - the one closer to the heart - the one they use to test blood pressure.
The nurse's eyes widen when I shed my jacket, the bottom of my scar showing its ugly sanguine-pink face alongside the pallid white of my arm, and she says "Goodness" and asks timidly what happened.
"...It's a long story," I deflect, with a light grin dancing across my lips.
"Oh - one of those nights, eh?" she says with a falsely-warranted knowing smile.
"Yeah...something like that," I say, my grin spreading across my entire mouth, incisors visible, realizing that the nurse has mistaken my blood fetish for a drunken accident involving mirrors or windows or brawls. Her mind can't even conceive the possibility of this sizable scar being borne of hatred; out of lust for blood.
My grin disappears.
How quaintly naïve.
I almost smile. Almost.
-M
