Chapter 19
The more time passed, the more of her I consumed.
But what, in the end, would be left of her?
Neil
I kept staring at the photo of my mother and father.
Mom wore her wedding dress and wasn’t smiling.
It looked like she was watching me.
It looked like she was sad.
Dad had an arm wrapped around her waist, and he pressed a kiss to her cheek.
He looked happy.
And, fortunately, he wasn’t watching me. I would have been even more ashamed.
Kim said it was more exciting to touch each other in my parents’ room.
My heart was pounding hard inside my chest.
“Neil, where are you?” I heard Logan’s small voice calling from the other side of the closed door, and I wanted to answer him, but my babysitter wouldn’t let me.
“Shh…keep quiet.” Kim licked her lower lip and grinned at me. I nodded in surrender and let her continue torturing me. She loomed over me as she told me that she still had so much more to teach me.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to keep myself from crying.
I never cried while Kim was hurting me.
All I could feel was my stomach twisting with the urge to vomit.
I focused on the photo of Mom and Dad.
I felt consumed.
Dazed.
Filthy.
Stripped of a soul.
Stripped of dignity.
I’m sorry, Mom, that I wasn’t brave enough to tell you, I thought.
***
I smoked a cigarette in the dim light of Selene’s room, sitting awkwardly at her desk in a chair that was way too fucking small for someone my size. It was late at night, and another one of my nightmares had gotten me out of bed, nervy and sweating.
Kim woke me up once again.
She couldn’t handle not being the whore in my head for one single night.
I blew smoke into the air, turning my attention back to Babygirl. I watched her as she lay there snoozing in the bed. Sheets covered her bare legs, and her torso was swathed in my white sweatshirt.
I fiddled with the Winston between my index and middle fingers. I closed one eye and squinted into the burning cherry, which was slowly burning through the entire thing.
And maybe that was me for Selene.
Her combustion point.
The more time passed, the more of her I consumed.
But what, in the end, would be left of her?
I took another drag as the smell of smoke mixed with coconut wafted around between the walls and stared at my Babygirl.
I studied her disheveled hair spread out across the pillow in auburn ribbons, her flexed arm, and her hand closed into a fist next to her plush lips, still swollen and pink from my kisses.
Then I turned my attention to her alabaster skin; there were reddish marks around her throat from my bullying hands. All of my desires were written on her body, a record of the sex we’d just had together.
She was brain-meltingly beautiful, naive, and sweet, and she looked at me like I was the kind of man who was worthy of her purity.
I heaved a sigh and rubbed a hand over my face and up through my hair. I jostled my leg anxiously and stared at Selene again as the darkness welled up inside me.
Sometimes, I had to run.
I had to go and then come back to her.
We had an unhealthy relationship.
We both knew it.
So why was she wasting her time with someone like me?
She needed to give her dreams to someone who could actually make them come true.
She had to save her tears for someone who deserved them.
And her embraces for an angel like her.
Not for me.
I sucked in more nicotine, poisoning my lungs a little bit more as I thought.
Whenever things finally felt good with Selene, my past would grab me by the hair to remind me that I needed to stick to my shadow world. The one with the blonds, my father’s punches and slaps, with my own unseen tears and defiled body, with my anxiety, fear, loneliness, and dysfunction.
Every time I tried to step foot out of that chaos, the monsters would drag me back in.
I was trying to stand in her light.
I was trying to follow it.
But how could I do that?
How could I do that when I was still a prisoner?
I walked slowly over to Tinkerbell’s bed and sat down, the springs creaking just a little. I held the cigarette between my lips, squinting through the thick smoke, and raised a hand to touch her cheek. I stroked her hair and neck while she slept peacefully on.
“I feel less empty when I’m with you,” I told her, knowing that she couldn’t hear me.
“The room isn’t so cold when I sleep with you.
But I’m afraid of getting swallowed up. By you.
By what you give me. By the things you want from me.
Besides, who is going to put me back together when you shatter me?
” I asked her, taking another drag. Selene twitched slightly under my hand, but she didn’t wake, so I continued.
“You have this power…so much of it. You can shatter me, but I can’t let you.
It’s been so hard patching myself back up; I can’t let you tear me apart again.
” I had finally copped to the greatest truth of all: I was afraid of her.
I, Neil Miller, was afraid of the seemingly magical power of this girl with the ocean eyes.
Fairies were dangerous; I’d known that even as a child.
They would encircle you, enslave you, and then abandon you, leaving you nothing but a shambles of misery and desolation.
Babygirl groaned in her sleep, slightly parting her plump, rounded lips with their shape like a heart.
I scrutinized her long eyelashes and continued to slowly stroke her silken skin.
I’d taken her furiously, full of anger and lust. I wanted her to see that she couldn’t keep searching for some good in me, that she couldn’t keep pushing up against my limits.
I myself was very aware of how abnormal my behavior was and how hard I was to manage.
For a moment, I had gotten lost in her body as I sought the oblivion of pure pleasure, but I’d immediately come back to reality, where my life was nothing but shit.
“You’re not mine, and I’m not yours,” I told her, still smoking.
“Because we belong to the world, not to each other. We’re souls, not things.
And there will be someone else for you someday.
” It was draining to sit there and admit that I wasn’t good enough for Selene, to confess that I couldn’t give her the things she needed.
I understood that she liked me, and I knew that she desired me, but the question always remained: Would she “love” me if I didn’t look the way I did?
Kimberly had loved me too but only because I was “a beautiful boy.” She told me so plenty of times.
Recalling that caused a wave of misery to move through me, so I got out of the bed and padded barefoot over to Selene’s desk. I tossed my cigarette butt in the trash and then poked through the kitten-patterned pen holder, searching for a black marker.
When I found it, I popped off the cap and walked over to the mirror, where I could just see my reflection in the dim light.
I stared at my body, covered only in my boxers.
Long legs, slim hips, defined abdominals, swollen pecs, and broad shoulders.
I examined the two tattoos, the swollen veins that branched out into meandering tributaries, dark underneath my skin.
I looked like a grown man now, but inside, I was still ten-year-old Neil with all the marks of Kim’s abuse visible on me.
All at once, my face shifted. The beard vanished.
The eyes softened, the hair grew longer and messier, and the features became more delicate, more youthful.
I now wore an Oklahoma City basketball jersey and a pair of blue shorts—the ones I always wore to play basketball out in the backyard.
Suddenly, I wasn’t in Selene’s house anymore but back in my childhood home in New York.
My conscience was guilty, my soul was stained, my innocence was decimated, and my babysitter’s voice was constantly in my head.
With my eyes locked on my reflection and the memories spinning around in my head, I gripped the marker and began moving its soft tip around on me, like my skin was a canvas to be spoiled, a wall to be graffitied, a paper to be scrawled upon, or a shitty story waiting to be written.
I pressed the marker into my skin wrathfully, drawing all kinds of shapes all over myself.
Slowly, the rising sun began to illuminate me.
Another day when I’d managed to wake up before destiny, but it wouldn’t change anything.
After an endless minute, I let the marker fall to the floor and, with the back of my hand, smeared the black ink over every patch of skin I could reach on my chest, throat, and arms. I spit out the cap I’d been clenching in my teeth and stared into my reflection in the mirror again, longing now to smash it.
“Neil.” I heard Selene’s voice, but I remained motionless.
“Do you see that, Babygirl? There’s something broken and twisted inside my head,” I said, gazing into the glass.
“What are you doing?” I heard the bedsprings protest and the sound of faint footsteps approaching me slowly.
Was my Tigress afraid?
“It’s their fault, too, you know. The people who get raped.” I looked out through the glass, talking to her the way she was always begging me to do.
“Wh-what are you talking about?” she stammered. Obviously Selene didn’t understand me—she couldn’t.
“The Boy liked Kim’s attention. He was willing to be touched.
He should have told her no, but instead, he let it go on for a year.
” I smiled sardonically, shaking my head.
“I’m filthy because of me,” I concluded, turning to face her.
I immediately locked on to her ocean eyes as they roamed over my body in horror before returning to my blank, lost eyes.
“No, Neil. It’s never a child’s fault. Never.” She paused. “What did you do to yourself?” she asked, quickly wiping a tear away from her cheek. Did she just not want to cry in front of me or had she understood what I was talking about?