I stand here, frozen, trying to make sense of the situation. All I asked was for him to be careful with my things, and now it feels like I’ve insulted him in some irreparable way. The shift in his mood is sudden, unpredictable—like the sky before a storm. I feel trapped, boxed in by his anger and the physical presence of him standing between me and the door.
I put it down to a joke. Nobody would react like that to such a small thing. He was just playing a part, acting in a role, and I’m the one misinterpreting it. Because nobody sane would ever act like that.
“Fuck it,” he snaps, and for a moment, the room feels like it might explode. But then, just as quickly, the tension dissipates. He picks up the remote, plops down on the bed, and acts like nothing happened.
“So, what should we watch?” he asks, smiling again, as if the last few minutes didn’t just unravel me.
Later, he finds Sabre’s banana bed and plops it on my head, laughing at how ridiculous I look. He snaps a photo, and shows it to me. I’m laughing, a goofy grin on my face. I hate people touching my head, putting things on my head. But with Timmy, I don’t seem to mind as much. He’s giving me cute attention, and it reminds me of the day he put the octopus toy on my head, and leaned in for our first electric kiss. It’s absurd, but it makes me smile. He’s back to being silly again, pulling me into his whirlwind of nonsense.
He stands across from me, a goofy grin plastered across his face, one hand holding a baby pacifier while the other clutches an oversized baby shark toy. His body is a strange contradiction—a large, fully-grown, shirtless man, with childlike enthusiasm.
He places the pacifier between his lips, and he lets out a high-pitched chuckle, totally lost in the moment, completely aware of howridiculous he looks. I snap a picture and he cocks his head to the side, eyes growing large in mock surprise, as if he’s the star of a show that’s both hilarious and completely baffling.
And then he yanks off his pants and wraps his giant caterpillar around himself, like a diaper. “Take another picture!” he says, muffled by the pacifier.
In this moment, he seems to relish the attention, a combination of childlike wonder and unabashed silliness. He’s enveloped in being the center of attention, even though it’s only us, embracing his inner manchild to a degree I’ve never seen.
Then he takes it a step further. He removes the caterpillar and places the baby shark toy down on the bed, and picks up his deer skull with antlers attached. And then he places the skull on his semi-erect cock, the white bone stark against his skin.
My mind races at the absurdity of this. He has a way of challenging the bounds of comfort and normalcy, all while maintaining a carefree smile that invokes both laughter and disbelief.
“Take a picture!” he says, his voice playful yet daring, as if he’s presenting some kind of avant-garde art piece.
So I do.
He runs around naked and keeps getting me to snap pictures of him placing his hands above his head in the shape of devil horns. He’s excitable and definitely experiencing some kind of mania again. So I just let him do his thing and laugh, because some of his antics are quite funny.
“I’m obsessed with cuddles and sex and ice cream.” He says it with such joyful abandon.
“You definitely are obsessed with those three things,” I smile. “You speak the truth.” And none of those are bad things. In fact, they’re all wonderful things. He loves to make us special ice cream sundaes every night, and we sit in bed and he spoon-feeds me while we watch movies.
“Dentacle porn!” he yells at one point.
“Excuse me?” I quirk a brow at him, thinking I misheard him. “You mean… tentacle porn?” It randomly came up in conversation the other day. He hadn’t heard of it before, and so I’d explained what it was. He seemed fascinated, instantly googling it and bringing some up on his favorite porn site.
“Nope!” He exclaims proudly. “Deep throat dentacle porn. It’s like tentacle porn, but with dentists. Or vehicular dentacle porn, which is all of that, but it happens in a car.”
I laugh and shake my head. He’s on one of his rolls where he just says weird shit. And that’s fine. He’s making me laugh. It’s one of his quirks.
“Be careful having that on the bed,” he says, pointing at my laptop at one point. “The computer will heat up. It’ll get brain damage, just like a brain.”
“There are 48 hours in a day,” he announces a while later, cracking up at his own comment when he realizes his math is off.
His antics are funny, and he has the funniest way with words. I can’t deny that. But beneath the laughter, a knot tightens in my stomach. He’s unpredictable, swinging wildly between moods—playful one moment, angry the next.
I have butterflies—but not the good kind. Frantic, heavy wings beat against my ribs, signaling that something isn’t right. My heart races, a persistent gnawing dread creeping through my veins. I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong—I don’t know what, but I can feel it in my bones.
It’s like I’m living on a knife’s edge, never sure which version of Timmy I’ll get. And the more I laugh with him, the more I feel like I’m losing tiny pieces of myself along the way.
He curls up beside me in bed later, spooning me, and whispers into my ear, “I really care about you, Margaux. I just want to be close to you all the time.”
His words are sweet, but they also feel heavy, like an anchor sinking into my chest.
I’m tangled in him now, deeper than I ever intended to be.
And I’m not sure if I’ll be able to pull myself free.
50