So I can look at her rosy cheeks while reading her words.
So her moans are fresh in my mind.
I read them and get jacked up.
Then, either I wake her up to fuck her again or I work out like a demon.
Because her written words flow in my veins, float through my chest like the nicotine smoke of a cigarette and I don’t know what else to do.
She thinks I’m exercising, breaking my bones, tearing up my muscles because I have some kind of a death wish. Because I want to be at the top of my game when I get back.
I don’t tell her that it’s because of her.
Because I don’t know what to do with her.
I don’t understand her. I don’t understand where she came from and how she affects me like this. I don’t understand what to do with the words she leaves me.
I don’t tell her that I’m obsessed with her letters.
Because what the fuck is that going to accomplish anyway?
I am going back.
I am going to be at the top once again.
That’s my destiny, isn’t it?
That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what they taught me to want, my parents. My mother.
Greatness and perfection.
So I don’t understand why there’s a pain in my chest. Why it hasn’t gone away since yesterday, when it appeared at the party.
Why is it so intense, so fucking massive that my heart – the thing that I thought I’d killed a long time ago – almost rips out of my chest and thumps on the floor, sullying the notes spread out before me?
It’s beating and beating. Pounding, my heart.
As if it’s really a crazy little maniac, like she told me. The most alive thing in my body.
The most alive thing in the world.
The most alive it’s ever been.
For the girl who writes me letters.
Hundreds and hundreds of letters. Thousands even. Because she’s been writing them for the past eight years.
And that’s because she’s been in love with me for the past eight years.
She’s in love with me.
With me.
She’s stupidly in love with a man who knows nothing about love. Who knows even less about it and relationships than a fucking four-year-old.
Jesus Christ, Salem.
Baby, you’ve fucked up. You’ve fucked up so bad.
I bark out a laugh.
For some reason, I can’t stop laughing tonight.
For some reason, it hurts every time I do.
It hurts to be hunched over her scattered notes.
It fucking hurts to read her words over and over, while rocking back and forth as my reborn heart bangs against my rib cage.
She loves me.
She. Loves. Me.
Why does she love me?
Why does it hurt that she does?
Why does it hurt that I can’t be anything other than what I am?
Why can’t I breathe? Why the world is still closing in at the thought that I’m The Blond Arrow?
The fucking perfectionist who can’t love the girl who’s in love with him.
I once heard a song about a girl dancing on landmines.
Slow dancing.
Because she wanted to hold on to this boy she was in love with. And holding on to him was like holding an explosive in her hands. So she’d tiptoe around him all so she could love him. Until one day everything blows up in her face.
Things explode and she catches fire.
Well, what else do you expect when you fall in love with a grenade?
What else do you expect when you fall in love with the sun?
It’s what the sun does.
It burns everything. Melts everything. Turns everything into dust.
That’s why Icarus, the fool who flew too close to the sun with wings made of wax, was stupid.
That’s why I am stupid.
And miserable and sad.
But what I’m not is angry.
I’m not angry at him. For being who he is. For being the sun he is.
I try though.
Especially the next day when I wake up and see, through the bars on my window, there’s no snow on the ground. It’s not that I love the snow or anything. It’s just that I thought there would be some evidence of what transpired between us, me and him, only a few hours ago.
Some evidence of the chill, the wreckage.
Even his love bite is gone. I don’t see it sitting on my neck, in the mirror.
As if I imagined everything. Imagined his teeth. Imagined the snow.
Again, I try to be angry at something.
At him.
But I can’t be because it’s not his fault.
It’s not his fault that he doesn’t want love. He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t even know what to do with it.
It’s not his fault that he’s The Blond Arrow.
He trained for it his entire life. He worked for it.
I have seen it with my own eyes. His dedication, his determination.
His single-minded focus.
So it’s not his fault that in the pursuit of all that he forgot to be anything else.
To be anyone else.
It’s not his fault that he’s lost.