Chapter 13 Neil
“I had left my heart with her,
Even though it was broken.”
Neil
Again.
I sank back into my abyss once again.
Swallowed up by the darkness, condemned to eternal torment.
After talking with the Krew, I’d gone straight out to the pool house.
Alone and far away from everyone else.
It was cold in there, and I sat naked, huddled up in a corner rocking myself.
I had just taken another shower. Water dripped from my hair down the length of my body. Once again, I felt beaten down by the other who lived inside me.
“What did you do!” The Boy standing beside my bed regarded me disdainfully, disappointed in my behavior.
Instead of letting me think and try to figure out the goddamned Player situation, he instead needed to rake me over the coals for spending too much time with Selene and revealing too much of our past.
“You told Selene everything! You shouldn’t have done that!” he accused.
His childish voice was irate, almost unrecognizable.
“I only wanted to push her away,” I said defensively, my hands on my endlessly throbbing temples.
I wished he would just go away, that he would vanish from my life, but I knew that would never happen. I knew that he would continue to hang on tightly to me because I was incapable of really dealing with the abuse I’d experienced.
“But you didn’t! You let her into our world instead! You’re giving her permission,” he scolded me furiously. “How could you? I trusted you. You can’t abandon me for her!”
He was on the verge of tears. I could see it in his eyes, glistening and full of suffering. And he was right.
I couldn’t pick Selene; I couldn’t make that kind of mistake.
I couldn’t condemn her to a disastrous life alongside me.
My brain didn’t work like other brains. I was a different kind of man, and not in a good way.
“That won’t happen,” I answered, looking at the mattress. My pack of Winstons was lying there, and I really wanted to light one up and exhale all my tension with the smoke, but I was too weak. My body barely reacted to stimuli. My muscles were shot, and my head was spinning.
If I’d tried to stand up, I would have ended up right back on the floor.
“It can’t happen. You can’t forget about what Kim did to us.
” These words were followed by an action I hadn’t expected at all: The Boy pinched the waistband of his shorts in his fingers and pulled them down his slim legs.
I frowned in confusion. He just kept going, though, hooking his thumbs into his boxers and taking them down as well, exposing his naked body to me.
The differences between us were immediately obvious: His little body was undeveloped and skinny, while I had the body of a grown man who had been wounded too deeply inside.
“Look at me,” he ordered, pulling my attention back to him. “Remember how it hurt when I ran to the bathroom and scrubbed myself and the skin wouldn’t stop burning?” he asked. I stared at the reddened area around his genitals and felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs.
I remembered it all too well.
That skin irritation was one of the first signs something was wrong. It was something my mother should have noticed. She should have helped me, taken me to a doctor right away, but instead, the only treatment I had available was washing myself. It soothed the pain that I felt inside and out.
“What about these? Remember these?” The Boy continued tormenting me, lifting up his jersey.
He had red scratches across his abdomen, caused by an adult woman’s fingernails clawing at his skin and at his soul.
I could still feel her long nails on me, and when my lovers also had them, it gave me the exact same soiled feeling.
By that point, I had lost all control over myself, and the Boy was proof of that.
He used our shared victimhood to keep us bound together, and in this way, he made it impossible to maintain a stable relationship. Because of him, I couldn’t give myself over to anything except sex.
The Boy wanted me all to himself.
He wanted me totally socially isolated so he could force me to give up on the idea of ever having a better life. He suppressed my emotions, making me cold and often apathetic. He erected a defensive barrier all around me, cutting me off from anyone who wasn’t him.
“You’re selfish,” I told him with a bitter smile. I was struggling to keep a lid on my anger.
I could feel the tension in my nerves, and that was never a good sign. My patience had limits, and beyond them, I knew no reason. I did realize, though, that it wouldn’t do me any good to go at the pool house like it was my heavy bag.
It wasn’t going to make the Boy leave.
“We both know what you need…” He slowly got dressed again, never taking his golden eyes off mine.
Sex.
I needed sex. Not for pleasure but to violate myself.
I got to my feet, still damp from my recent shower. The smell of shower gel enveloped me, but it offered me no relief. I still felt so dirty.
I began pacing around the room like a maniac, trying to decide if I should get in touch with Jennifer or one of the others.
My contacts were full of blonds ready to fall at my feet, if that was what I wanted.
The problem was that while I did feel some arousal at the thought, it was minimal.
If I thought of Selene, by contrast, a devouring, unmanageable passion burst to life inside me.
“You lost control a long time ago.” The Boy read my mind, tracking my every move with his eyes.
“You shut up and piss off,” I exploded, glaring at him. He just laughed insolently.
“I live in your head. Where can I go?” He shrugged and remained right where he was.
Damn, he was right.
Where was I expecting him to go when my body was his home?
“Go fuck yourself!” I snapped in a burst of frustration.
In a fog of confusion, I made my way over to the bed to retrieve my pack of Winstons and got myself a cigarette, bringing it shakily to my lips with my trembling right hand. It had been shaking for a while now.
What time was it? I had no idea.
The only thing I knew for certain was how profoundly unstable I was. With Selene, everything was way too difficult, way too demanding, and way too much for me.
Why the fuck hadn’t the clinic freaked her out? Why hadn’t she yelled in my face about how disturbed I was? Why hadn’t she been disgusted and vanished from my life for good?
If she had turned around and walked away from me right from the start, she wouldn’t be in Player’s crosshairs now.
She wouldn’t be a part of his game.
We’d had some good times in Detroit and even here in New York, but that didn’t mean…
What if she was just too softhearted to abandon me?
Fuck.
That’s what I hated more than anything: the pity…what a noxious feeling.
“Stop thinking about her,” the Boy advised me, as I paced around nude like a lonely beast in his empty cage.
“Call Jennifer,” he went on coaxingly, determined to make me give in.
I didn’t want to hurt myself; I didn’t want to violate myself again.
I didn’t want to suffer as I behaved like a man with no morals.
“But you are a man with no morals, Neil. Why else wouldn’t you stop Kim sooner?
You’re a sick, twisted person,” he said challengingly.
That was how he always acted when I wasn’t listening to him: He turned to strong-arm tactics, dredging up memories of the past to make me feel guilty.
“Today, you abuse yourself. What if, one day, you abuse your daughter?” he demanded archly.
I froze with my cigarette between my lips and stared at him. I felt cold down to my blood and bones. That was one of the reasons I never wanted children, especially daughters.
“Maybe I ought to get my revenge; what do you think? If you abandon me, I’ll just come back and hurt her. I’ll turn big and strong like you, and then I’ll show you who’s boss,” he challenged me.
By then, I was blind with rage. I stalked toward him and took him by the throat.
I slammed him back against the wall before sliding him up to eye level with me.
At first he kicked and struggled against me, but then he realized that was useless and just smiled smugly because he understood that, really, he was the powerful one.
He manipulated my mind and contaminated me again and again.
“If you keep living in my head…” I whispered to him a hairsbreadth from his face, staring hard into his eyes, “I will kill myself,” I finished resolutely. Finally, just doing it would be the only real way to free myself from him.
Never…never would I put another person through what I had been through.
Least of all some hypothetical daughter whom I never even wanted to have.
“Your mind is torn in two, Neil,” he replied.
“Today, you think of yourself as the hero, trying to save everyone from yourself. Tomorrow, you might become the villain. You might hurt someone and not even remember it because…” He paused to laugh again before continuing, slowly and clearly so I could read every word on his lips.
“I am the monster, and you are my victim.”
I released him and turned away in shock.
The Boy was a part of me that I had to kill or suppress completely if I ever wanted to be free.
If I didn’t succeed, I would have to follow him and die along with him.
“Get out…” I murmured, staggering back again. “Get out!” I yelled, and he walked through the bathroom doorway, vanishing into thin air.
“Neil…” It was Logan’s voice this time that called out to me. I whirled around to face him and caught him staring slack-jawed at me. “What are you doing?” He was probably trying to figure out why I was chain-smoking buck naked while talking intensely with…
“Having an argument,” I answered, taking another drag like this whole shit situation was completely unremarkable.
“With…with whom?” Logan asked, looking through the clear glass window in front of me.
“With myself,” I admitted.
There was no use making something up; Logan was well aware of my…quirks.