I grimaced at my reflection, fixated on the red streaks creeping down my jaw.

“Why don’t you go to the doctor,” she said, worriedly, from behind the bathroom door. “It’s too late for that,” I hissed.

She thought I blamed her for the infection. Before our relationship became serious, and even in the weeks following its serious turn, she begged me to get a tetanus shot. I refused. There was something romantic in the risk.

The first time she kissed me, she held back. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. But one night she kissed me without thinking. I remember the sound of the nails in her mouth grinding against my teeth. I remember the taste of blood running down the back of my throat and down the sides of my mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t be,” I replied, still believing in romance. She urged me to go to the hospital. “What if it gets infected,” she asked. I muttered something about fate, trying to smile with my mangled orifice.

I continued staring at myself in the mirror, convinced the red streaks were getting longer by the second, making their way to someplace vital. Probably to my heart.