The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

She’d been clear as a nightingale’s song: if you never betray me, you have nothing to fear. In response, he’d kissed her hard, the kind of kiss that breaks apart the sturdiest walls and lets softness in. Unlike others before him, he’d delighted in the electric currents that sparked from her fingertips and shocked his skin. She held him tighter than she’d held anything in her life. Together, they were incendiary, alive, and indestructible.

Or so she thought.

She decided she’d never try to surprise anyone ever again, because this time, the one time she’d tried to be romantic and spontaneous, the greatest surprise had been her own. As she approached the barn where her beloved worked, she was greeted with the usual smells of sweat, hay, and sunshine. She smiled as she tiptoed carefully through the grass, trying to be as quiet as possible.

Five feet from the barn, a cry from within stopped her cold. If it had been a cry from an animal, she wouldn’t have paused. But this. This sound was decidedly human. And decidedly familiar, too.

She knew what she’d witness when she stooped to peer through a gash in the barn’s façade, but she did it anyway. And there it was. Porcelain skin. An amalgam of limbs. A rhythm she knew too well.

She felt her heart harden as she stalked away, fury mounting in her chest. Her fingertips ignited and burned. She raised her hands to the sky, banished the sun, and coaxed clouds black as silt to gather above her. She ordered them to roil and turn and toss until a funnel burst forth.

She heard the crack of wood as the tornado splintered the barn apart, but even so, the sound of their lovemaking continued to ring in her ears.