Soon, his visits to our house dwindled. He became withdrawn. Remote. Aloof. He talked less and stared a lot. And, although he was the same age as Ricardo, and was not an inch taller, he’d started toappeartaller, as though his posture was somehow corrected. He walked straighter, quieter. His arms grew thick with muscles, and strong like he was lifting trucks in the mornings, and his face got harder, stonier. He looked strangely older. Cold and deadly.
But still we loved him.Lovedhim. And always, always looked forward to his visits. Dinner in the evenings wasn’t the same if Chadrick was absent from the table. We considered him a part of our family.
My brother called him “brother”. I called him “Blood”. He called me “Tweety Byrd”.
And in the end, he betrayed us. He clipped the wings of the Byrds.
And he ruined me.
My Blood ruined me.
My reading partner colored my mind with reality, and ruined me.
Wandering through the garden, I watched my feet as they made small, unhurried, purposeless steps to nowhere. If I could run away from my very self, I would.
As I traipsed under a tree arcade, I spotted a bench swing under a sprawling, flourishing maple tree and directed my steps toward it.
Although the night was dark, when I reached the bench swing, the ground light was adequate enough for me to discern it was made of oak, and had words carved into the top wood:Margaret & Ford—Souls Enshrined, Engrafted and Entwined.
With an eye-roll, I clapped my ass down on the swing and pressed my back over their names. The idea of love didn’t repulse me. It was because I knew I would never experience that with anyone. Souls enshrined, engrafted and entwined—whatever the hell that even meant.
The very prince of my dreams when I was younger had turned out to be the villain. And that’s when I stopped believing in fairy tales.
But that love thing must be a real good thing why people chase it so hard, so fervently. Love was either the best thing that could happen to a human, or the worst damn thing.
For me, the only ‘real good’ I feel in my shitty life was during sex. And that ‘real good’ was usually fleeting. Once I came, it was all gone, like a fading essence, and all I want to do was chase it, catch it and plant it within me. Which was the reason I craved sex so much. To make the ‘real good’ last as long I could before it evaporated from me like steam dying in cool air.
A rare small smile tugged at my lips and I shook my head. But hell, I did feel something more than ‘real good’ last night. Withhim.What I felt with him inside me, on top of me, surpassed great, bordering on extraordinary. And the ‘after’ feeling lasted longer. It didn’t leave immediately. It lingered. Stayed a while. And only faded because he moved.
Because the feeling waswithinhim. The second he got off me, the feeling didn’t vanish, it just changed, from ‘extraordinarily great’ to ‘real good’. And that ‘real good’ didn’t leave until I was out the room.
I bit down on my lower lip, hard and punishing, crossing my arms and hugging myself tight until my ribs hurt, an attempt to distract myself from acknowledging that: it wasn’t the sex that made me feel that unprecedented euphoria. It washim. Just him.
Whether I was fucking or fighting him, he was undeniably, uncontrollably mind-consuming.Hemade me feelgreat.
Sure, he also made me frightened, uncertain, and sometimes petrified. But the overriding emotion was irrational desire.
After I’d hit him and run last night, he hadn’t chased after me like I expected him to. Didn’t threaten me or send the club manager to fire me. In fact, I didn’t see him at all after that. Which was something to worry about.
I might have crossed the line with that uppercut. So avoiding the club for a week at most and plotting a new move seemed shrewd.
Plotting. Pfft. The amount of clear opportunities I’d had to kill him and didn’t. Last night was another easy kill. And instead of taking advantage while he was vulnerable, I took off.
I was losing focus and perspective, caught up in depression and self-loathing, knowing I have a task to complete but, subconsciously, failing on purpose.
The Voice would call again soon, and he wasn’t going to be pleased to hear of my failures. And the last thing I should be doing right now was giving him reasons to believe I was a liability instead of an asset.
The truth was, while I still wanted freedom, I no longer wanted revenge. Revenge wasn’t looking all that appealing anymore.
I wanted something new, something more, something sweeter than revenge could ever be. Chad.Alive. And mine.
I was between a rock and a hard place. How did I eliminate the one person who made me want things I’ve never wanted before? Made me feel things I’ve never felt before?
The bench swing suffered a steady and forceful push from behind, and before I could register what was happening, my body was flying forward through the air.
I landed in the grass with a muffled thud and an “umf”. Senses momentarily scattered, I rolled over on my back with a groan, my limbs protesting with small winces of pain.
Before I could gather the energy to spring up and assume a defensive position, my attacker was already straddling me.
