He is.
“I am.”
“I can’t be part of whatever this, you out here taking to yourself, and a fire. This is madness.” She says, pulling on her arm to break my grip on her, but I hold on tight.
Whispering in her ear, I lick the shell of it with the tip of my tongue. “Just a week ago you wanted me to burn you. What changed, baby?”
“You did.” She growls, looking at me defiantly, lowering her brows with a wrinkle of her forehead. “Right before you ghosted me.”
“I’ve been here all along.”
It’s true, he has been.
“You know she can’t hear you, right?”
“Hear who?”
Me.
“Him.”
“Who?” Phoenix asks, yanking herself from my hold, and pushing me back a step from her.
Me.
“Him.”
“Him who?”
I can see the aggravation rising in her, and it gives me a satisfying little chuckle that my madness is as annoying to her as it has become to me.
“The one in my head.” I say for the first time out loud to anyone.
For years he’s been with me, but never have I ever spoken about him to anyone. Not to my therapists as a teen, not to the outreach program director who took me in, not even to the captain who’s been my only father figure. No one has ever known that I’m not alone in my thoughts. Now she does, and it’s scary and…liberating.
“I’m sorry, the what, where?”
Me! The voice in his head that makes him crazy!
“Will you shut the fuck up and let me explain it to her?” I yell to the empty air around me, making myself look even more insane then I already feel.
“Zeph, what the fuck?” She asks, struggling to get past me to look in the dumpster.
“Don’t Phoenix.” I say to her, but not stopping her from looking.
She gasps putting her hands to her pretty little mouth when she stands up on her tiptoes and looks into the burning trash bin, seeing the remnants of my “work”.
“Fuck Zeph, another one?”
It’s like something from the twilight zone watching her look into the dumpster then back at me, her face first growing white, then her cheeks reddening with some emotion that my little psychopathic mind can’t figure out. Is it fear? No. Is it anger? No.
It's lust you freak.
“No.”
Yes.
“No what?” She asks, peeking back into the fire as if she didn’t get a good enough view the last two times now. “No what Zeph?”
