Demon Stories

Beau: White Rose Petal, 1913, USA

Beau

White Rose Petal

1913, USA

Curled up, I look like I'm sleeping. My breathing suggests sleep. But oh, I am not sleeping.

I would never abuse myself when there are so many others who would abuse me for themselves. I'll let them. But not tonight. Tonight is for me. It is not for the flesh, for sometimes the mind can have such pleasures which the flesh can not even dream.

Oh these soft feathers in my memory of your's. Your soft white feathers. Silky to down.

It is selfish to know you think of me this way, too. Can it be selfish if it is fact? 

Sometimes, my hands fold involuntarily, on their own in the creases of the blankets. They're looking for your slightly folded hand. Always, you were on the left side of me when we slept, do you remember? I remember your black hair of silk, how impossibly straight and thick. 

It would be in a curl as only straight hair can curl, and I'd straighten it back for you by flipping it over. Just a small detail, but oh such pleasure I would feel. Your hair was so smooth, but cold. It got cold in the December mornings especially. Sometimes I'd take it into my hand, just the tip of whatever bit I could find at the time, and just hold it there for a moment or until you woke up. 

Holding your hair like this gave me a strange feeling. You'd laugh if I told you the feeling. It gave me the feeling of ownership. Not like you were a dog, do not misunderstand. It felt like, as long as I held your hair like this you could never go away. 

Eventually, you would wake up, and I'd try to make it seem like I had been up for hours. Sometimes I had, sometimes not. You always saw straight through me when I was lying. But it didn't matter, because once you were up I was free to touch your body.

I'll never understand how someone's skin could be so white. Just white like paper. In the winter mornings, the white light from outside would make your skin look so white it was like translucent. I swear I could see all the little blue veins running through you. Always, I could see some of them in your hands, just at the surface on the backs. That's how translucent you were, how skinny.

It was very apparent that you worked hard in life. Though on the business side of things in your family's company, your father had made you work hard, that much was for certain. For such muscles are not gotten by sitting around and talking business. You can't get such muscles by being served alcohol and laying back with a pretty girl. 

Even in sleep, your muscles rippled with your breath. I'd tease myself, and not allow myself to touch your body until you woke up, but my body would ache for you. Just one swipe of the finger under your chest, please. Please to begging. Let me touch the insides of your legs, let me pinch the insides of your thighs with my long fingernails. Let me kiss the interior of your upper arm, the one facing me and closest to me. 

Even with the muscles, how skinny you were. How tall you are. Its hard to remember how tall you were, but you stand a whole head higher than I do. How tall does that make you? How lean and long it makes your body look, your neck looks so long, too. I could kiss up and down that neck for days, for ages. The peak of your Adam's apple is like secret that you won't tell me until you wake up and I can kiss it again.

Did you know, there are freckles all over your skin? Well, maybe not all over, but they are there in certain spots. Oh and what certain spots they are. Such as, there is one very light and small one at just where your ribcage ends on the right side, towards your back. My lips always ache to kiss this place. My lips love to kiss and count every one of your freckles. You have thirteen. The darkest one is on your collarbone, and I always count it last because its also your favorite but you don't know it.

Why are your eyelashes so long? Why do they taper just perfectly, and flip upwards just so? Why can't I bring myself to kiss them when you sleep? Oh, why didn't I kiss them more...

Sometimes when my mind is full of such pleasures, it can go one of two ways. One way it can go is to drift off into a dream, and if it drifts off into a dream during such a time of pleasant reflection then I might dream about you. I might get taken right back to where we were so many years ago. I might believe we're in that familiar bed together, and how you're breathing right next to me again. Your short puppy breaths. 

But if my mind drifts the other way, and I don't dream, I'll go into a wakeful nightmare. I hope you do not get wakeful nightmares, for they are worse than dream ones. For a wakeful nightmare is when I start to remember that I was the one who left you. I was the one who was so weak and stupid that I left you, just walked out one day while you were sleeping. 

I know your wakeful nightmare must be the memory of when you woke up without me. Your beau was not there to kiss you all over when you woke up. There was no good morning hug. My face was not pressed into your hair. I didn't hug you like we were dying. 

All we did was die that day. We became no more.

When I think of these things, in my wakeful nightmare, I can still feel the overgrown grass under my feet, growing through the neglected cobbles of the front of the chateau. I didn't even look back. It was so damp that day. Your skin had been unusually dewy, creating a glow around you. 

I want to go back and kiss that glow and hold you to me. I want to turn back time and take you back and hold you close to me like never before, like every morning when I know how without touching you I would die. I would die, because you are my life. Without you, I can not survive.

But I survive. I survive, and for what? What was so important that I have to leave you? You are my white rose petal, my purest reason to live on this earth. 

As I cry in my nightmare, it comes crawling back up and into my heart, these reasons. 

I had to leave you. I had to leave you because in loving you, I was killing you. My love was killing you. 

And this, more than anything, more than the memories of your beauty and your innocence, your pure love, makes me cry. I cry oceans of despair over and over again.

But you'll never know it. I don't want you to know it. Better for you to think I grew apart from you. Better for you to hate me, as you surely do. 

Hate me, my love. Hate me, I beg you.