As Elias walks in, the girl behind the counter looks up.
“Hey, Elias.”
“Hi, Shiloh. Can I give Turtle a treat?”
“You mean the voracious gremlins across the street didn’t rob you blind?”
Elias’s pretty lips tug slightly. “I saved a couple.”
“Did you hear that, Turtle? You’re getting the leftovers.”
Elias says, “She has you and all the customers. They have no one.”
“Hey, no guilt trips.”
“Sorry,” Elias says even though I see nothing for him to be sorry for. “It’s been a … well. Sorry.”
“Bad day?”
Elias looks away, uncomfortable. “Something like that.”
The girl behind the counter, Shiloh, looks like she wants to say something, but Elias walks toward the window nook and sits on the floor by the cat’s chair. He reaches into the pocket of his gray hoodie. Above the arm of the chair, I see the cat’s back arching as it stretches. Elias smiles a little. He sets what I assume is a treat on the seat of the chair. He puts the next one on the floor and the cat jumps down.
“Still no sign of Onyx?” Shiloh asks.
Elias shakes his head. “I haven’t seen her for weeks. Emmy made me stop putting out food on the patio. She said it would bring rats into the store.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I should’ve taken Onyx to the shelter. Maybe someone would’ve adopted her. It was selfish of me.”
“You really are having a bad day.”
Elias stuffs his hands in his hoodie pocket. “Sorry.”
“Tell you what. I’ll put my cleansing blend in the incense burner. That’ll help.”
While Shiloh busies herself with the incense burner, Elias picks up the book I left. The cat crawls into his lap and curls up for a nap. Elias starts to read.
Everythinglookspeaceful and good and happy, but it’s not. Elias, at random moments, takes deep, harsh breaths. He’s thinking. He’s upset.
Shiloh’s cleansing blend isn’t going to help him, nor is her unobtrusive presence. She’s like a benevolent queen or aunt in one of those stories. She isn’t cruel; therefore, she isn’t relevant.
What Elias needs is a hand at his throat. He needs a dominant weight bearing him down. He needs this illusion of hisinnocence shattered. He needs it punished so he can scream and cry and find freedom in the wickedness as it devours him.
He needs the truth laid bare: that he is part of that wickedness.
Soon, baby, soon.
He needs to suffer more first. He needs to wrap himself up in this cloak of innocence and isolation that he’s worn for so long. He needs to feel again how much he hates it, so that when I rip it away from him, when I fuck him until he comes, screaming, in the dirt, he recognizes the truth of himself.
When he breaks, he needs to break along all the fault lines already agitating inside him—and nothing makes a person break like terror.
Elias, because he’s not as innocent as he looks, knows this. That’s why he asked for it.
***
I give it a few more days. I need to be sure that Elias is convinced of his abandonment.
