Mine by Maddie Coe

The blood flowed freely from his mangled nose, mingling with the sticky juices already covering the front of his blue and grey Avalanche t-shirt. Looking into the old grimy mirror above the sink, the pain was so intense that Mason Scott was forced to grit his teeth to examine his nose thoroughly. Pushing left, then right; up a bit, and then pulling it down — trying to assess the extent of the damage. It was bad. So bad, he could see the scar tissue inside his left nostril where eight years ago his parents had taken him to get his nose cauterized because he was always getting nose bleeds after a run in with a schoolyard bully. Mason couldn’t remember the kid’s name but he’d been harassing a friend of his named Alicia Brooks on the school bus all week and everyone had been too scared to do anything about it. Everyone except Mason. He’d stood up and told the bully to stop or he was going to punch him until the bones in his hands were broken. He’d meant it, too. Someone would have had to drag him off the rotten bastard. Without a thought the much larger boy had laughed and sent Mason sprawling with a fist to the nose. Tears mixed with blood and rage as Mason had laid in the aisle of the bus blinking up at the bully. Not exactly the heroic scene he’d envisioned at the time, but some good had come out of it. He’d learned two important lessons that day. One was that standing up for someone else was pointless and could potentially hurt like hell; the other being that although losing a lot of blood might be scary, the punch itself hadn’t been nearly as bad as he’d been afraid it would be. In fact, crazy as it sounded, Mason had kind of liked it.
    A life changing moment, even at the tender age of eleven.
    But that was then, this was now. Somehow his bitch of a girlfriend had sliced completely through the cartilage in the upper part of his nose. Adding insult to injury, Sarah had done it with his own damn knife. Mason had been holding the double-edged dagger menacingly in front of his face as he prepared to slice into her belly again when Sarah had lurched forward, head-butting him with the razor-sharp knife trapped between them. She screamed. He screamed. His vision blurred white just for a moment and he nearly passed out. When his sight returned to normal, he saw a four-inch horizontal slice on her forehead and blood cascading over her perfectly arched eyebrows, through her eyelashes and down into her eyes. The cut didn’t look deep but head wounds always looked worse than they were, bleeding like crazy. The dark crimson fluid made Sarah’s beautiful blue eyes look truly demonic and Mason couldn’t help but think, God, she looks so beautiful . And he wanted her more in that moment than any woman he’d ever been with in his life. But then the pain of his own injury jolted him from his fantasy.
    He could still hear Sarah whimpering in the other room as he looked for something, anything, to staunch the flow of his own blood. Unfortunately, the bathroom in the hunting cabin was bare. Kicking off his right boot he bent over and yanked his sock off. Dabbing at the wound caused him more than a bit of discomfort but he sucked up the pain with a smile on his face, adrenaline pumping through his veins. Just thinking about his girlfriend’s silky blonde hair, long legs, and spectacular full breasts was enough to make Mason forget the agony of his wound. He felt his penis starting to get hard in his pants again. Man how he loved that bitch! She was absolutely perfect. He hated her too, could barely stand the fucking sight of her most of the time, but it was that strange attraction/repulsion that was all part of why they needed each other so badly.
    Anger and lust and frustration and rage got the better of Mason as he spun from the bathroom, walking in an awkward, uneven gait with one boot clomping off the floor as he walked across the cabin’s hardwood floors. It reminded him of what he thought a peg-legged pirate would