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 thingsyou 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. Youcanshatter 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.
