Save Me

Chapter Twenty-Five

Falling for him again, letting him back in, all of it was a mistake. I felt the itch to hurt him coming back, like it had never even left me. I thought about how easy it would be to let myself go, to give into my darker fantasies again, all that night. I imagined his screams in my head, his begs and pleas, and I imagined his blood everywhere. On my hands, on the bed sheets, in my mouth, on my tongue. I couldn't tell if the thought of it repulsed me or excited me.

But I stopped myself still, I forced myself to the other end of the room and I made sure I stayed there. I didn't want to hurt him.

I kept repeating it in my head from dusk 'til dawn, I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to hurt him.

But I did.

He stirred when the light of the sun started to shine through the window. Its rays reached over the bed, over his sleeping face, and I found myself watching him again. He moved away, burying his face in the pillows, and didn't wake again for another hour or so.

"Did you sleep at all?" he asked me, sitting upwards in the bed. His hair was sticking up at the back, and his skin shone from the sun, shirtless but covered by the white sheets of the duvet.

"No," I admitted. "I barely sleep these days."

"Sleeping is one of my greatest talents," he said, laughing and stretching out his arms. "Sleeping, and fucking."

"You're not the only one that's good at fucking."

"Oh yeah, I remember," he teased.

"You do?" I asked. "What do you remember?"

"That you liked it rough, for a start. I know exactly what you're into. You like to fuck hard, you like to slap them around like your pretty little victim."

"Not you, though. You fought back."

"You liked that too."

"Did I?"

"You liked it when I hit you back," he affirmed. "I know it. You punch me, I punch you back, we make out on the floor all covered in blood and sexy - it's all history, baby."

"I remember that," I said.

"That was the first time I saw you as a real person, not as some idiot, some control freak, some sadistic piece of low-life shit-"

"-Okay, okay, let's not go any further."

"It just goes to show you, how little you can really know a person," he said. "I wonder sometimes..., never mind."

"No, what? What do you wonder?"

"If we're good people." He was sitting up in the bed and looked out the window as he asked, unsure of himself, maybe still sleepy.

"I don't think it matters," I told him. "As long as you can live with yourself, as long as you can sleep at night-"

"-But you can't."

"Well, that's me. You're not me."

"I'm no better than you though."