The Slapping Game

Part 2

"Damn. That must hurt a lot. Doesn't it hurt a lot?" Vee inquired loudly. "It must sting like hell. Aren't you getting tired of putting up the act? It's a brave act and all but still, all that pain must –"

"It's your turn, Vee," Aaron said.

SMACK!!

Blood pattered to the ground and Vee felt a sudden thrill of excitement, but then he realized that it was still coming from the half-moon cuts on Aaron's knuckles. Cries of dismay sounded from all over the classroom, some of the more impressionable students suddenly deciding that they didn't want front-row seats to the battle. As places were hastily exchanged, Vee's excitement began to give way to anger. The moment he felt Aaron's sticky palm make contact with his skin, Vee moved with lightning speed, striking before his adversary had had time to remove his hand. A new exchange began, one which quickly began to exceed the previous flurry in tempo and force, and soon Aaron's light grey pants were spotted with a fine spray of blood as every impact only served to worsen his injuries.

Before long Vee was laboring under pain and with every slap he began to emit a grunt. It was an ugly, drawn-out sound, but it helped him put up with the pain from his mutinous appendage. He was beginning to suspect that it also helped him to increase the force of his delivery. Soon he was grunting the same way his father would clear his throat whenever he wanted to annoy someone; explosively and with great zest.

The exchange stalled the moment he noticed an oddness to Aaron's hand.

"Why'd you stop?" Aaron immediately barked, holding his hand out as if demanding to be slapped.

Vee cringed at the sight before him.

The majority of the skin was so deeply purple that it verged on black, the large scar at the center of his adversary's hand now appearing to bulge out over its entire length. He was surprised that it hadn't burst already.

Doubt finally intruded upon his mind. There was no way he was going to remain within the teachers' good graces if the game were to continue. There were already too many witnesses there and the state of his own hand would make it only too clear who was responsible for Aaron's injuries. He wasn't too worried about what Aaron's family might do about his state; his opponent's scars told him all he needed to know to believe otherwise.

With great regret, he decided that the time had come to put an end to the game.

"Alright, Aaron, I've had enough, I cuhh ..."

"What?" Aaron asked in puzzlement.

"I cuhh ... I mean, I cuHHH ...." Vee insisted strenuously. "I –"

"Oh no! Don't you dare!" Aaron warned him. "I expect more from you. We aren't done yet!"

"I'm done. I don't care if you aren't. I went easy on you at first but with these last few I gave it all I had. You should consider yourself satisfied with that, you fucking masochist."

Aaron stared at him for a long moment.

"What the hell are you talking about?" He finally said with a bewildered look. "Your first hits were impressive, alright. You've just been going downhill from there. These last few slaps you were hitting me almost as hard as I was hitting back. You haven't been giving your best from the moment we started. You owe me better than that."

"I don't owe you anything, Airhead!" Vee growled, trying hard to conceal his interior turmoil. Aaron's statement horrified him. He was sure that his last few blows had been earth-shattering. What Aaron was saying came into complete contradiction with his view of events.

"Yes, you DO owe me, Vernon," Aaron stated bluntly. "You've been owing me for quite a while now. I've had to put up with your two-faced act for three years now, which means you owe me for not beating the living shits out of you the moment I realized what a fucked-up, daddy-issue, mommy-complex little fucker you are, Vernon."

Vee barked out a protest that didn't sound coherent to his own ears. Aaron's hand simply floated there, waiting for him to pop it like a balloon. A cruel smile spread manically across Vee's face, twisting it into something hideous as his rising hand came to a pause over his head. With a deafening bellow, he propelled the hand down to smack against the back of Aaron's outstretched member.

There was something very wrong about the sound of that slap.

He stared down at his handiwork and was mortified by what he saw. The central scar stood wide open and was disgorging an enormous amount of almost black blood from its interior. The gash was about as deep as it was wide and blood dribbled over the sides of his hand and fell pattering onto the floor, making real what would otherwise have been a scene like so many others in a horror flick. It was, in fact, the abundance and manner with which the blood splattered over the tiled floor that made him certain that he had gone too far.

His stomach lurched. Turning away from the offending injury just as Aaron began to inspect it, Vee vomited explosively onto the tiled floor, each enormous expulsion accompanied by the sound of blood rushing madly through his ears. Once his stomach was empty, he collapsed onto his knees and slapped both hands against the floor on opposite sides of the mess. His right hand ached and throbbed as he stared down at the remains of his breakfast, a remote part of his mind finding it strange that it hadn't yet passed into his gut. He barely registered the shooting pain in his arm, his hand Los Angeles, his shoulder New York, the telegraph operators at each end frantically trying to communicate with one another. He didn't focus on the pain at all; what held the majority of his attention was the fact that some of the pieces of sausage strewn out on the floor appeared to have barely been chewed. His mother had always warned him about wolfing down his food like that.

A gaping red mass suddenly occupied the space between his eyes and the sausages. It stood there, asking to be slapped once more. His mouth formed a comical 'O' of horror and he followed the bleeding hand to its source. Aaron stood there stooped over, an almost pleading look on his face.

"Just ... Just try a little harder, alright?" He whined.

His face was in close proximity. An odd detail made Vee's eyes trail towards his opponent's scarred lips. There he finally became aware of what he had never bothered to notice before; the imperfect, almost semicircular scars there were patterned a lot like bite-marks. They were, he decided, almost definitely bite marks. He formed his lips to speak.

"You've never felt pain a day in your life, have you?" He managed to croak.

An air of the deepest anguish appeared on Aaron's face, an expression so strong compared to anything Vee had ever seen there before that he felt compelled to turn away. Only then did his numbed mind register the presence of a white-faced teacher standing among the horrified students.

The meeting had ended and the student look-outs,so entertained by the development inside, had apparently forsaken their sacred sentinelduty.

The End.