Chapter Two
Thank god I always slept with my phone on silent.
Josh had been busy after he’d left the restaurant. I’d missed seventeen drunken texts and had two voicemails all anchored around the theme of how we had something really special, and we could go the distance, before pivoting into how I was an ugly slut. I skimmed the first few before deleting the voice messages without listening to them. I blocked his number but didn’t bother to hide my social media from him. Allowing old dates to see how much better I was doing without them was a favorite pastime of mine, and I would hate to rob him of that opportunity.
One of the best features in the apartment was its heated floors. The moment my toes touched the twinkling black marble, they were greeted with the warm kiss of walking on obsidian sunshine. I turned on the tea kettle and scooped the ground coffee into the French press, just as I did every morning. My eyes drifted to the smudges on the window and I frowned. The morning light reflected beautiful shades of yellow and orange off the warehouse’s floor-to-ceiling glass and snaking river, illuminating the imprint of my face, forearms, and hands. Pale yellow light caught the streaks where I’d clenched my fingers into fists. My toes curled at the memory, thoughts longing for the scent of moss. Normally I’d wait for the maid, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted her seeing my near-perfect outline.
But cleaning was a post-coffee task.
I pressed a few buttons on my phone, and it connected to the apartment’s sound system. In the mornings, I kept the music happy and easy. I toggled over to a beachy playlist that I’d loved while lying poolside in the tropics. My therapist had agreed that veering away from the lyrical tragedies of soulful ballads had done wonders for my mental health.
The happy beats pulsed through my apartment, loud enough for me to twirl while quiet enough not to disrupt my slowly waking soul. The apartments had been blissfully soundproofed, so even if the owner of the penthouse had owned a buffalo, the reinforced floors never would have let on. I didn’t worry about the volume as I let the music carry me to distant memories of ninety-degree weather, to sand between my toes, to sunny days, to smiling faces, and to a life far, far from this one.
I grabbed the oat milk from the fridge and stared back at the small pieces of sentimentality I’d allowed myself. I had a magnet with the cover of my first book that had sent me into hysterics the first time I’d seen the trinket in a bookstore. A second magnet of the Columbian flag secured a picture of Nia and me grinning in the autumn sun while Kirby held a bucket of apples over their head like it was a UFC belt. It was one of the few bits of evidence that I had friends. Beside it, a small, grainy, black-and-white photo of my great-grandma holding my infant grandmother on the shores of the Norwegian fjords was one of my only tokens of sentimentality.
The kettle clicked and the spell of ruminations broke—both of sensual hands on my hips and of joyful, tropical days. Memories and fictions wouldn’t serve me, at least, not unless I was writing.
I let the coffee steep in its French press while I did the laziest form of my morning routine: skin care, messy bun, and a slouchy T-shirt. Having my own place meant no one could force me into the tyranny of pants. I grabbed my laptop, my coffee, a spoon, and a jar of farmer’s market honey before settling onto the couch. I liked my coffee dark and sweet and had once read that local honey had healing properties. It wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to fact-check, as I didn’t want anything interfering with what may or may not have been the placebo effect that lent itself to my clean bill of health. Plus, living alone also meant no one could judge me for spooning in honey every few gulps.
He’d made fun of my questionable combination once, though he’d amended that he certainly didn’t mind. My caffeine abuse made sleep harder for me, and if I was awake in the dead of night…well, one thing often led to another.
I combed through thirty new emails and idly wondered if the staff at Inkhouse ever rested. There were always new edits, rewrites, legal documents, proposals, marketing needs, or strings of panicked messages over bootlegged copies of my books circulating. I scanned to see if anything sounded important but only clicked on the messages from Allison. She’d been my beta reader since my first Pantheon novel and exclusively sent love letters. My mouth quirked up at the soliloquy regarding my brilliance and attention to detail and describing how she’d nearly killed her dog by chucking her tablet across the room after the plot twist. I bit my lip at the dose of serotonin that coursed through me.
I closed my email tab to see what the group chat had sent in the overnight hours. They’d shared a handful of short, thirst-trap videos of hot girls, screenshots of various memes, and Nia had waxed poetic about her husband bringing her breakfast in bed. I clicked out of the chat without responding. They knew I was behind on my deadlines. I had work to do, people to please, asses to kiss, and changes to make. The Pantheon series wasn’t going to write itself.
I’d focused on a different world region for each of the novels. My debut had followed a valkyrie as the protagonist. It had revolved around the Nordic gods, Valhalla, and the Viking wars of the first century. It had taken the world by storm, debuting at number five on the New York Times bestseller list. Inkhouse signed the series for five books in total, giving me a king’s ransom for an advance. The second book was a conflation of Greek and Roman gods and deities—a sequel that had outsold the debut novel ten to one.
When asked what had led to Pantheon’s juggernaut success, I told them that my mythology novels had something that glittery vampires of yesteryear lacked: kinky, gratuitous sex.
I was now struggling through the third installment. My main character was a Brazilian wilderness guardian on the cusp of the colonization of the late 1500s, and my only editorial note was that I was coming on a little heavy-handed on my stance on deforestation. As much as I loved elementals and their lore, I struggled to connect to the lush jungles, sheer mountain ridges, and flooded lands near the Amazon. Perhaps I could convince my publisher to fund a trip to the rainforest and write amid the toucans and jaguars. I was relatively confident that anything that could be written from my apartment in the city could be written in a hammock amid tropical greenery with a cocktail in hand.
Instead of focusing on my edits, I clicked through a couple pages on animal adoption. Every few weeks I talked myself out of getting a chinchilla, a rabbit, or a cat. I knew it wasn’t wise to own an animal, given my propensity for transience. But knowing didn’t stop one from wanting, and I was admittedly lonely. My memories wandered to the exotic pet I’d invented for myself as a child. A white fox had played with me in the woods, had kept me company when I was sad, and had been my only friend in the world when I’d had none. My strict parents would never have allowed an animal in the house, but my imagination had always been vivid, and I’d needed something to stay sane. I missed that fox from time to time, though my imagination had taken on a more mature theme over the last few years. No amount of sushi with Joshes or disappointing hookups had staved off the ache for something real, though I did try.
I’d told Nia that I wanted what she had, and she informed me that no, I didn’t. I was suffering from a textbook case of Grass Is Greener syndrome. As much as her happy life with a supportive husband called to me, so did my siren’s song of hopping on planes, living in solitude, and sleeping with strangers. She was right, of course. She knew that her marriage to Darius was the exception that proved the rule. I’d never met anyone else who was glad they’d tied the knot.
Then again, I didn’t know many people.
Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. I knew everyone. Some I knew through social media, others through dates, and many from my previous life as a lady of the evening. I just didn’t like, speak with, or care about many. People were tiresome and rarely seemed solution-oriented. Why would they bother complaining about where they lived if they weren’t willing to pack a suitcase and move? What was the point of telling me how much they hated their spouse if divorce wasn’t an option? Their problems were exhausting, and I didn’t have the emotional capacity to feign empathy for half of them. Particularly as my lifestyle grew more controversial and obscure, it hadn’t taken long to prune my friend group further and further until I’d whittled it down to three—all of whom I saw almost exclusively through the accessible magic of the internet.
It would be nice to love and be loved. It would be really goddamn pleasant to have someone else make the coffee while I slept in. I wanted to wake up with someone beside me, to watch Fire and Swords while cuddled on the couch and to have a built-in guardian to babysit a chinchilla if I needed to be away for a few days. But though I continued to put myself out there, my heart wasn’t open to falling in love.
I tilted my head up from the couch to look at the still-present smudges on the window, then looked away. I’d do what I always did. I’d explain away the psychosis that felt so, so real, with a familiar mantra: It had been wishful thinking. I’d willed myself into believing I wasn’t alone. I’d leaned into the glass, hoping, wanting, craving, dreaming. There was no one there, nor had there ever been.
My phone buzzed.
(Nia) Please tell me you’re leaving the house today? I’ll never know what happens in Brazil if you lose your mind to isolation
(Marlow) It isn’t just Brazil. I’m doing a blender of South American lore. Thus the name.
(Nia) Pantheon, yeah, yeah, very clever, I’m obsessed, I get it, now answer the question
(Marlow) I’ll get curry from the Indian place down the street
(Kirby) You know that means she’s ordering in. You think we don’t get your sneaky wording by now. Leave the house, you bastard. Go on another date. Bone a stranger in a club bathroom. Just leave your goddamn apartment.
(Marlow) Make me.
(Kirby) Don’t tempt me. I’ll come over there.
Kirby would if I gave them the opening. Both they and Nia would. Despite living within an hour of me, my friends knew better than to show up at my place. I was reclusive enough to ignore the buzzer even if they stood outside my apartment and pressed the button for an hour. They understood, and they didn’t push. Even when Nia had dropped off soup during my bout with bronchitis, she’d left it with the receptionist, knowing me well enough to get that I considered showing up unplanned an act of aggression.
I appreciated my friends more for it.
Allison, the only other person I counted as a friend, lived on the West Coast. We kept our conversations limited to the worlds I created and the characters within them. It was the way I wanted it. As long as I could stay disconnected from the dullness around me, I’d be satisfied. At least as satisfied as one could be while forced to live in reality.
We both know it’ll never make you happy, he’d said. But if you’d prefer mundane restaurants and forgettable men over what I can offer…
He knew as well as I that mundanity wasn’t what I wanted. The only pieces of this life that brought me joy were escaping it. Sometimes through food, sex, drugs, or rambling through the markets in a country where I didn’t know the language. For a few minutes, sometimes even for a few days, I could pretend that I was someone different. I could let go of the chains that shackled me to the earth and disappear into a marvelous something.
It may have been too early in the day for drugs, but I walked to the bar cart and flicked the top off a bottle of amaretto. I spiked my honey-sweet coffee until the almond liquor refilled the mug nearly to the brim. It was a drink strong enough to purify one’s innards and kill the common cold. But the alcohol helped. Each tingling buzz aided me in closing one of the many open tabs in my brain, which would allow me to focus on just what I was writing, just what I was watching on TV, just what I was eating. The noise was too much to handle without a little containment.
A text came in from my editor. She announced in no uncertain terms that she knew I’d seen her emails and was ignoring her. She told me that she loved me, that I was very pretty, and very talented, but that she’d paint the streets with my blood if I didn’t get her five new chapters by the end of the week.
I chuckled at the message.
The company had paired me with EG, the perfect hostile, irreverent counterpart.
I sent her an emoji with a wink and a kiss. EG responded with a middle finger, an eggplant, a fist, and three droplets of water.
Her threats were an effective rallying cry.
I put on the shittiest audiobook I could find while I brushed my hair, tidied my apartment, and waited for the initial buzz from the alcohol to kick in. I refused to read anything worthwhile these days. Not only did I not want to compare myself to the greats, but nor did I want to risk being accused of idea theft, but I found that spite was my favorite motivator. Every terrible idiom, every clumsy sentence, every ill-conceived plot and obnoxious main character highlighted ways in which I’d like to do things differently.
Gandhi told us to be the change we want to see in the world. He was probably talking about kindness or charity or something, but I preferred to apply it to becoming the author I wished everyone else was.
I returned to the living room a few times, swigging deeply from the coffee until the alcohol tingled in my fingers and toes. By the time the liquor’s effects hummed gently in my ears, I clicked off the audiobook and settled in to write one, then three, then seven pages. It wasn’t exactly five chapters, but EG would get what she’d get. I’d looked up only twice, each time to fill my coffee cup with pure liquor. When I finished, I sent them to my editor without proofreading. I glanced at the clock to see that it was already five in the afternoon. I’d eaten nothing. And I was gloriously shitfaced.
Ignoring the day’s worth of notifications on my phone, I went directly for the food app and made good on my promise to get dinner. I ordered three dishes, planning to freeze a few of them so I’d have lunches and dinners for the next few days like the responsible meal prepper I was. I flipped on a mindless show about the hunt for Atlantis so I didn’t have to be alone with my thoughts while I waited for my butter chicken and rice. By the time the delivery person buzzed for entry, my tingle had worn off.
My huff sent the loose pieces of hair around my face into a cloud as I sighed at the liquor bottle.
I’d sworn to myself that I wouldn’t drink when sad, or bored, or angry. I’d allocated my love for controlled substances to writing, dating, and going of social outings. It was a rule I’d made in my era of sex work. From the shame-based public narrative, I’d expected escorting to be drug-addled and woeful, doing lines to get through a session or to numb myself from an encounter. Instead, I made more money each working night than I could possibly spend in months, ate at the best restaurants on the planet, was flown to gorgeous locations, met a number of the world’s high-and-mighties, and was able to save up enough money to live exclusively off of what I’d set aside while I launched my creative career.
Still, I kept to my rule. I only drank to create, or in the company of friends. No matter how good it might feel to remain toasted around the clock.
(Kirby) Haven’t heard from you all day. You alive?
(Marlow) Ate, sent off pages, and I’m going to the aquarium this weekend.
(Kirby) Did you drink water?
(Marlow) What are you, my mom?
(Kirby) We both know I care way more about you than your mom does.
I closed the chat again without answering. My contentious relationship with my mother was no secret. I huffed loudly to the empty air as I grabbed a can of sparkling water from the fridge and curled into a ball on the couch.
Kirby hadn’t pushed the point any further. They didn’t dare repeat what they’d implied far too many times, but I could feel their pain. I was alone. I didn’t speak to my parents given the enormity of our religious fallout. After I’d grown too old for a fictional fox, the only creatures with whom I interacted were lukewarm romantic distractions that lasted anywhere from one night to six weeks. My friends insisted that an empire of nice apartments, designer shoes, bestselling novels, and complicated gadgets was worthless if I had no one to share them with.
My most promising shot at love had ended two months prior, on February 13.
For nearly three months, I’d come so close to falling for a girl with a bright Irish accent and a sparkling personality. Her name was Eve. She had hair so red that I would have sworn on a Bible it was fake, but she’d merely laughed and pulled up pictures of her as a toothless toddler with crimson curls. She was interesting, educated, grounded. She never asked anything from me, only offered encouragement and support. She loved my books, but not so much that it made me uncomfortable. She was never demanding of my time, energy, or attention. She was in STEM and easily one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. Despite her laboratory work, she played the fiddle, spent most weekends singing folk songs at an Irish tavern, and had a ravishing gallery of photos in medieval cosplay. She was funny and kind and had Nia and Kirby enthusiastically planning our wedding after the second date. Our sex had been spectacular. She was everything I’d been looking for.
Almost.
After a tearful breakup over the phone where Eve had demanded to know what she’d done wrong, I’d uselessly repeated that she was perfect. She’d called me a coward for breaking up the day before Valentine’s Day, and she was probably right. But the holiday hadn’t been the only motivator. I knew exactly who and what was sabotaging my love life. My heart was spoken for as uselessly as if I’d fallen in love with a book character. If I couldn’t step out of my own hyper-fantasia, I’d never move on. I just needed to learn to channel the cup of imagination, containing it to its glass within my novels, not allowing it to spill out and get on my dress, drip down my inner thighs, ruin my panties, crumple my clothes to the floor, or create my outline against the wall-to-wall window overlooking the river.
And that’s why I huddled on my sofa, hugging my knees to my chest, and vowed that tonight would be the night. I had to tell him to stop visiting me.
I waited as the sky turned from blue to pink to black.
I crawled under the covers and stared at the silhouetted bottle of sleeping pills I’d forgone.
The bedside clock clicked from midnight to one to two in the morning.
It was 2:40 a.m. when I felt his presence. His weight pressed into the bed. The sheets shifted with his movements just as they might with a flesh-and-blood partner. My heart skipped painfully.
He pushed up against me, hands stroking, lips brushing, mouth sending chills up and down my spine as every inch of my skin rippled into gooseflesh. My body responded, wanting things that my heart and mind had forbidden. My hips arched with need, but they were traitors acting on their own volition. I’d rolled away, tucking my face against the pillow.
“Bad day, Love?”
“I’m not your love, Caliban.” I whispered the name I’d given him long ago. My choice had amused him, but he seemed to like it.
After a long pause in the darkness, he merely said, “You are.”
I stayed on my side, staring out the bedroom window at the naked, winter trees. There was a crescent moon that night, a sharp, bright sliver too thin to cast any light onto the evidence of madness between my four walls. I normally secured the curtains, but tonight I’d been trying to stay awake. I’d been waiting for him.
“You’re not real,” I whispered, speaking to the hallucination that held and broke my heart in the same hand. Loving him was my most foolish mistake. I didn’t want to be in love anymore.
Caliban’s cool breath moved a tuft of hair over the bare skin of my throat. His fingers glided along my jaw, cupping my chin. The scent of a green, misty forest consumed me. “If there’s anything I could do to change your mind, I’d do it. Ask it of me.”
“Caliban—”
He made a patient sound. “But you won’t. We’ve been through this,” he said. “I know you remember.”
My throat worked through my nerves, swallowing the lump of emotion, but I said nothing.
I couldn’t forget the last night I’d seen him, though I’d tried.
I’d been twenty-one for six months. Red and green and blue lasers of a sleazy club thumped through the memory. It was the night I’d graduated from college. I’d smelled like cigarette smoke and had done too many bumps in the bathroom. Despite the drunken fog that blurred the memory and the empty spaces where liquor had expunged details, I couldn’t let it go.
It was the night I’d ended my ability to see him.
I had stumbled home from a night of partying. I’d been living in a basement apartment in a seedy neighborhood that Caliban, my parents, my friends, and anyone with a mouth had told me to run from. Still, it was all I could afford unless I was willing to live with roommates, and I was not. I’d fallen down the outdoor staircase that reeked of piss, twisting an ankle and limping into the apartment. I’d slammed the door and secured the deadbolt, gritting my teeth against pain and regret in equal waves.
I’d been served shot after shot at a bar of something blue that tasted like cotton candy. I’d danced to the worst pop songs on the top forty station, been tongue-fucked by the starting pitcher on the college team in the single-stall, all-gender bathroom, and gotten in the car with someone too drunk to be driving. I was exhausted but, like many other naive idiots in their early twenties who had no concept of sugar and its role in hangovers, had been deeply committed to mixing my vodka with cherry-flavored energy drinks. The uppers and downers vibrated through me as the world wobbled. I slammed my palm into the textured apartment wall, searching for an outlet that gremlins must have snatched while I was clubbing. I sank to the floor, succumbing to the linoleum.
“Do you want me to turn on the light?” Caliban had asked, setting a bottle of water beside me.
I’d been having a good night. A great night, even, save for the twisted ankle. This was exactly how one was meant to celebrate major milestones. I was living the dream.
At least, I’d convinced myself I was having was fun until I heard his voice. The moment his silken words washed over me, the carefree facade cracked. What followed were not pretty, lady-like tears but the heartbroken sobs of the lost. I pulled my knees to my chest.
“Help me get to the shower,” I’d slurred.
And he had. I didn’t remember when a candle had been lit in the bathroom, or when he’d gotten me out of my dress. His ghost-white shape was an anchor in my swimming vision, rooting me to the present as I slow-blinked at him. He’d left the curtain open, soaking my bathroom floor in water so that the small orange flame might cast friendlier shadows than the ones that haunted me. I scarcely remembered the soothing touch of his fingers raking back my hair as I puked or the steadying presence that had held me as I’d cried on the bathtub floor. I’d been too wasted to appreciate how my cheek had felt against his bare chest. The spinning walls hadn’t permitted me to savor the moments as he’d washed my regrets away with soap and hot water.
“You’re not having fun” was all he’d said. I didn’t want to see the solemn expression that accompanied his words. He was so beautiful when he smiled. His crooked grins over white teeth, his snowy shock of hair, the winks he’d throw my way with bright, gray eyes that scalded me like a brand, electrifying every part of me. Tonight, I knew that looking at him would mean seeing resolute strength in the set of his jaw, that disappointment would pinch his brows, that there would be no smirk, no cavalier joking, no playful moments that would plant seeds within me, growing into a garden that blossomed only for him.
I’d cried into his arms so hard I’d nearly thrown my back out.
“It’s your fault,” I’d sobbed through the whirlpool of coke and alcohol.
His fingers had moved against my hair as he listened. I’d coughed on the shower water, choking on the pounding droplets as I continued, “I drink to forget the fucked-up shit I imagine at home. I don’t have friends because I just want to be here. I cancel on plans, bail on dates, rush out because there’s something better for me in the dark. I refuse to live with anyone in case you visit. I hook up with strangers to try to pound out the memory of how it feels when you…” My voice had broken. “You’re not real. I can’t keep playing this game. I need to get help. I can’t be like my mom…like my grandma… I can’t do this. I’m never going to be able to move forward with my life if I keep living in this fantasy.”
His arms tightened around me. His low voice was gentle but firm. “Love…”
“I don’t want to be in love with you,” I’d cried, squeezing my eyes tightly shut as I buried my face against him. I meant it. This pathetic, maladaptive daydream was destroying me. My wet hair plastered to my face and stuck to his chest. My tears, the shower water, the churning, twirling room had smothered me as I fought to get out everything I’d needed to say.
He’d kissed the crown of my head as he continued to run his fingers along it, stroking it with calm, steadying shushes. He’d brushed his lips against my hair that night under the running water just as he kissed it now.
My heart cracked as I looked down on the events of that night as if little more than a phantom floating above an ethereally beautiful man chipped from the stars themselves, arms around the wasted slivers of a twenty-one-year-old, candlelight flickering in the bathroom, steam filling the space, hot, angry bullets of shower water soaking them both as that version of me sobbed.
The kiss pulled me out of the memory, dragging me into the present. I was halfway through my twenty-sixth year again, between silken sheets, overlooking the river. My exhale contained the weight of the world.
“You’d said I wasn’t real and that you didn’t want to see me again,” he recalled. It wasn’t an accusation. Just a calm, quiet fact.
“I was drunk,” I said.
“In vino veritas.”
“And I haven’t seen you since,” I responded to the black nothingness. “That was the night that made me move, you know. To try to change my life. A week later—”
“I know,” he said, and he did.
Nearly six years had passed, and it was still one of the worst nights of my life. My eyes spiked with tears as I shoved the visions aside. Regret had coiled in me like a sleeping snake. It had slithered throughout me whenever he’d visited for five and a half fucking years. I’d hated myself for those words.
“You should know by now, Love” came his soothing voice as his lips brushed against my ear. “Our word is bond. We’re very literal.”
I twisted my sheets between my fingers, remembering the perfect mouth, the sharp teeth, the twitch of a smile that used to accompany his words. I wondered why he’d used we, but I supposed he meant the two of us. And he was right. “Five goddamn years without your face…but you didn’t stay away.”
He ran a thumb from my ear along my jaw, cupping my chin from behind as he said, “You told me you weren’t going to see me anymore. You said nothing about staying away. And with everything going on, you’re as much my escape as I am yours, Love. Neither of us wants this to end.”
I remained curled on my side, back to him. This was part of why he only came at night these days. He knew that it was easier for me to deal with the empty space in the dark—to cling to whatever semblance of hope or deniability—when shadows cloaked the room than it was to speak to an empty room in the light of day. My vision unfocused, lost to the budding trees that lined the river. If I’d still lived in the countryside, it would have been too dark to see the way the branches quivered in the overcast night. Instead, low-lying clouds captured the muted, honey-colored city lights, holding the night in an auburn glow.
“I do,” I said quietly. My declaration spread between us like smoke filling a room.
Caliban went deathly still behind me.
I closed my eyes against the silhouetted cottonwoods and oaks as I said, “I won’t have a shot at a normal life unless you’re gone.”
He tightened his hands around me, fingers pressing into me as he pulled my back against the hard wall of his chest, enveloping me. “You don’t mean it.”
“I do.”
His voice dropped an octave as he said, “Don’t make a rash decision, Love. Think about this. If you say—”
“The visits, the sex, whatever it is we have…it has to stop. It’s ruining my life. I’m losing my mind, Caliban—what’s left of it, anyway. My heart can’t belong to…” My voice splintered.
A sharp stab of pain shot through me as I opened my eyes and looked at the neat row of orange prescription bottles that rested on my bedside table. Store-bought serotonin helped make the world a little more bearable, but only a little. I looked so put together on the outside. I paid my bills, I went to therapy, I brushed my hair, I didn’t scream at strangers on the sidewalk. The world would never guess that my vivid imagination—one that had proved grossly profitable as an author—had slowly eroded me from the inside out as fantasy splashed over the cup, soaking my life.
He exhaled, and a feeling akin to lying on the misty forest floor encompassed me once more, his breath the cool chill of a fern leaf dragged along my skin. The silence rattled between us. He allowed the pause to stretch, late spring wind whipping from the north as it howled against my window. Its music nearly lulled me into sleep before he responded.
“May I make you a counteroffer?”
I held my breath, waiting for him to continue. He could be very persuasive. When I said nothing, he went on.
“Nothing you don’t explicitly ask for.”
A memory scratched the back of my mind as I thought of deals with the devil.
I chewed on my thumb and considered his proposal. I wondered how many times we’d negotiated. He was quite good at it, after all. His tongue, like his eyes, was silver. I wondered how many times I’d been locked in a heated debate with my burgeoning psychosis, speaking to the empty shadows. I contemplated the wisdom of refusing to tell friends or therapists about him. Maybe I just didn’t want to add a new set of pills to the tiny orange army that kept a vigilant watch over me. Maybe I didn’t want to risk alienating my already-dwindling friend group. Maybe, irrespective of my feeble attempts, we both knew that I didn’t want to let him go.
“You mean, unless I say the words…with everything? Sleeping in my bed? The kisses? The…” I couldn’t bring myself to mention our sex again. If I pictured it, if I spoke of it, I’d crave it. I’d want his fingers moving against me. I’d want him to suck an earlobe into his mouth, to drag his teeth along my throat, to use his cool fingers to explore my body. He’d sense the shift the second my mind switched to memories of him teasing my entrance, murmuring approval at how I opened up for him. His cock made everything else feel like eating ashes after experiencing caviar. Nothing filled me, nothing overpowered me, nothing worked its way into my limbs, blood, my soul the way that he did. He consumed me like cold fire, and he knew it.
“Nothing you don’t ask for,” he repeated.
I rolled toward him and regretted it. There was nothing there, save for the reminder of my insanity. I closed my eyes, preferring the blindness of shut lids as I felt every part of him. His hair, his smooth skin, the cut of his jaw, the strong shoulders that had held me, the arm that relaxed around me. He already had me at his mercy. The only thing I hated more than having him here were the nights he stayed away.
I felt so real. It always did.
“I’m crazy,” I said, voice broken.
It took him a while to respond. We’d gone back and forth on my sanity over the years, and I’d said on no uncertain terms that arguing with a figment of my imagination only made things worse and further proved my point. I’d conceded that, yes, I’d always had a terribly lifelike imaginary friend, but I rationalized that it was normal and healthy for children to have inventive imaginations. I’d told myself it was an asset, that the same love for fantasy that had given itself to fiction and novels and gods and powers had simply been poured too strong, splashing over the edge and drenching my waking mind.
But I was no longer sure if that was true.
His fingers moved in slow, tempting patterns along my back, then slipped around my arm once more, holding me like a vice. “Then be crazy in my arms. What do you say, Love? Do we have a deal?”