I tried to fight it—I did, and I’ll swear it to God Himself once I find Him—but I only lasted a day. And then I was back for her and that freckled fucking lip.
***
Yes,it’s as bad as you think. I did what you think I did, and I didn’t do it for some hidden, noble goal. If you’re looking for a reason to absolve me, you won’t find it. I can’t be absolved. I’m selfish, I’m vain, I chose that selfishness and vanity over Charlotte—and yet.
And yet.
The day my director presented the options to me—marry this bold, brilliant student of mine and lose everything, or break it off and keep the destiny I’d been promised—was the day my life ended. I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t perceive the knife sliding cleanly between my ribs, but there it was, a blade so long and so sharp that it severed everything inside my chest, it bled me dry until I was a shell, a husk.
You could survive me.That’s what I told her last night at the gala.
A pointless observation, really, because what mattered in the end was that I couldn’t surviveher.I didn’t survive her. I’ve spent the last four years in the opposite of survival, in the land of the dead, chanting her name to myself through the fog and incense of this netherworld I created for myself.
If you marry a student—one who wasyourstudent, the director had said,it’s over. You may scrape by with your job, but any hope of moving up, of getting funding—gone. You know how vicious academia can be. And her? Do you think she’ll ever command any respect or find a job of her own if she marriestheProfessor Cason? You’ll kill her future in this field before it ever starts.
He was right. If I married her, it was over, for both of us.But what I should have known was that it was over from the minute I saw her. From the first moment I beheld that freckled lip.
She’ll never forgive me. And she shouldn’t.
So then why did I take the trouble of interrogating her prick of a boss to find where she works during the day? Why am I here? Inside this dingy superstore listening to children cry and trolleys rattle through the aisles?
You know why.
Because last night, with my fingers inside her body and her body inside my arms, I felt alive for the first time in four years, for the first time since I let my slutty little supplicant face the worst on her own in that church.
And more importantly, she came back to life too, fucking my hand like a beautiful whore, murmuring husky threats as her body squirmed against my touch. There was no trace of the weary server then, no sign of that tearful, tired girl. She was once again my obscene little genius, my own pillar of flame.
If I had any heart in me left, it would have broken again seeing what the last four years had ground out of her, but those same years have turned me into a vessel of ashes, and so I felt only the usual bleakness, although it’s worse today. Emptier and grimmer than usual.
I suppose it could be remorse?
It’s not an emotion I’d particularly ascribed to my personality—I may be fascinated by religion and God, but I’m not a kind man or a warm one. I don’t even know if I’m a moral one. My only compunctions about fucking Charlotte after I learned she was my student were intellectual, were concerned with the quality of education I’d be able to give someone I also needed to see tied to my bed on a regular basis. But seeing her unhappy and worn down last night...
That knife is moving between my ribs again as I methodically walk the aisles looking for her. I thought I’d saved both our futures by abandoning her, but last night demonstrated that I definitively hadn’t saved hers. Somehow she’d gone from horizons of unbounded academic ambition to—well, whatever the hell this is. Shelving cheap food and carrying trays around and making me want to crawl to her feet the way she used to crawl to mine.
Except her crawling was bedroom play. There would be nothing playful about my crawling. Nothing sweet about a dead man begging for one last glimpse of life.
Is this remorse, then? Does it even matter?
I find her at the end of a long aisle, stocking a display of discounted biscuits, wearing a blue shirt and black pants that should look completely boring but instead draw attention to the swell of her hips and the small, pert curves of her tits. She doesn’t see me yet; she’s straightening up to stretch her back and bat at the stubborn curls wafting into her raincloud eyes, and that knife-that-could-be-remorse severs something crucial inside of me, something that had grown back since I saw her last night.
I bleed out internally all over again, I die again, I die miserably like I deserve.
What would she have looked like in her wedding dress?
What kind of rain would I have seen in those eyes as she walked down the aisle to me?
And then she sighs and looks longingly down the aisle towards the front of the store, as if hoping to see that time has raced by and her day is almost done, and I see the freckle on her lip. A teasing flaw right in the middle of that plush pink mouth, and hot, dark urges whisper through me.
I have to bite her again. I have to taste her cunt.
Just as I acknowledge these things, she sees me. Her eyes widen fractionally—surprise and longing and anger all swirling through those gray depths—and then she narrows her eyes in a such a way that makes her look like an avenging goddess. She could be Ishtar or Lillit. She could be Nemesis or Morrigan or Kali.
Fuck, she’s beautiful.
It’s not that I’ve forgotten over the past four years—on the contrary, I torture myself to visions of her perfection daily and nightly—but confronted with it in the flesh...
Well, it unmade me last night. It’s unmaking me now.