He’s right.
He is.
I can smell myself too. I smell spicy and musky, just like my name.
And then, I see myself.
Sprawled around him. My dress is hiked up to the tops of my thighs, my pale skin is glistening under the light. I’m holding on to his shoulders like he’s going to save me from everything bad in the world.
When he is everything bad in the world.
In my world. Him.
But what shocks me more than anything is that he’s… hard. His dick is hard and it’s pressed up against the most intimate part of me.
The bulge in his jeans is right up at my wet panties and I like the weight of it, the heat of it.
“I don’t. I don’t… want to…”
Finally, Zach stops and looks into my eyes and a tear breaks free, streaming down my cheek.
His thumb wipes off that tear with such tenderness that a few more shake loose and follow its path.
“You don’t wanna feel this way, do you?”
I shake my head. “No. Not for you. N-not for someone who…” I swallow as the words rip out from somewhere very, very deep inside of me. “Someone who makes me hate. Someone who doesn’t let me move on and let go. You change me. I don’t know how you do that but you change me into a worse version of myself.”
Something goes off in my chest, then. A bomb of memories.
Memories of that night three years ago when I said all sorts of things to him: the prom night.
You know how in love, you become a better person? You make me a worse person, Zach. I’ve never hated anyone the way I hate you. You’re nothing but a big, fucking bully. That’s all you’ll ever be. I’ll never forgive you for what you did tonight. For all the things you’ve done before. I’ll hate you till the day I die…
Zach breathes through his nose, clenching his teeth. “Yeah. I do, don’t I? So next time when I tell you to stay away from me, you do that. If I look at you, you look the other way. If you see me walking down the corridor, turn around and take a different route. Because the next time I see you in front of me, I’ll take it as an invitation. If you keep throwing yourself at me, I’ll snatch you up. And I’ll make you pay for it on your goddamn back.”
Zach rips his touch away and steps back.
I snap my thighs closed and jump down from the counter. My tears won’t stop falling and the last thing I see is the agitated plow of his hand through his hair.
Then, I’m running away from him. From his room. From the place he grew up in. The place with seven towers and a glass window that you can see the stars through.
I tear open all my bandaged wounds as I run and run. For miles and hours. Until I reach the house that I grew up in.
I make my way in through an open window in the kitchen and climb the rickety stairs up to my room.
Then I curl up on the floor and sob.
When I was about seven, I made my parents a card for their anniversary.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I guess I wanted to impress them. I wanted to show them that I was normal, like any other kid.
I wanted them to be proud of me.
But I guess that was too much to ask.
My dad took one look at the card and his face scrunched up. I remember him crumpling it in his hands and throwing it in the fire.
“You’ll always be an illiterate freak, won’t you?”
I didn’t know the meaning of illiterate but from his expression and the way he chugged down the whiskey in his glass in one go, made me think that it wasn’t a good thing.
I remember my mother barging in and trying to console him. “It’s okay, Ben. We have the best tutors. With practice, by this time next year, you won’t even know –”
“That he’s defective?” My dad clenched his teeth. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe I shouldn’t have married you. Because I know it isn’t me. I know I am not making him slow. It didn’t take me that long to learn how to write.”
I watched my mom cry at that, and then my dad turned to me. “Go to your room and stay there. No food for you until you can spell your fucking name right.”
I don’t remember much after that. I remember screaming – my parents fighting, and I know Nora snuck some food into my room later that night.
She loved the card I’d made. She even told me that she loved me.
I never said it back. I never said I love you too. Something made me clam up. Maybe the fact that she was looking at me with pity, or it could be that I never believed her.