I’m none of those things.
I’m alive. I have more life in me than anyone else on this earth.
Zach swallows, his own eyes appearing glassy like mine.
“Don’t lie to me, Blue,” he rasps, clutching my hair with mean fingers.
I jerk when he says my name. Well, the name he gave to me. The name that I’ve always, always loved in secret. In fact, I never even acknowledged it to myself.
I’m acknowledging it now.
Maybe because Zach not only says it, he makes me taste it. I never thought you could taste a name, especially not your own. But mine tastes… musky and spicy.
As if it were a truth serum, words slip out of my mouth before I can stop them. “You’ll find it. The… thing. Inside of me.”
His lips part too and he expels a pent-up breath. I take in his air, filling my body with what was once in his.
“Zach, I –”
My words cut off when he moves away from my lips. A moment later, I feel him on my neck. He’s nosing the line of my throat.
I grip his biceps. “A-are you smelling me?”
“Yeah,” he groans.
I flinch and my neck bends sideways. I’m nothing in the face of his aggression right now. The way he’s sniffing my neck, like he’s snorting a line of cocaine. I’m nothing in the face of that need.
Need of a junkie.
“Why?”
“Because you smell nice. Like sugar.”
And sugar is his favorite thing in the world. He’s eating up my scent.
God.
I arch my back when he gets to the triangle of my throat, and I take a deep sniff of my own. What I smell is exactly what I fell asleep to, in his bed.
His blueberry pie and musky scent.
“Y-you smell good too,” I blurt out, then clench my eyes shut in embarrassment.
Zach lifts his head and I have to open my lids when I feel his panting breaths over my lips.
He looks drugged up, I swear.
His pupils are wide, swirling like he really just took a hit of something potent, a narcotic that jacks up your heartbeat and sends you into the stratosphere.
“Do you know what else I’ll find?” he rasps, his fingers touching the pulse on my neck.
“What?”
“If I touch your pussy right now. Do you know what I’ll find?”
The P word is even more intimate than the V word and I can’t stop myself from arching my back even more and fisting his shirt.
And neither can I stop my pussy from clenching, opening and closing like a mouth. “No.”
Zach rubs our lips together. “Wet. I’ll find it wet. And swollen and slippery and fucking horny.”
Slippery.
I’m slippery.
I can feel it. The moisture, sticking to my panties.
“I can smell you from here. Your pussy’s wet, Blue. She’s so fucking wet. She’s leaking. For me. She wants me. She doesn’t hate me, does she?” he says, pouring his words down my throat, jamming it with them.
He’s right.
He is.
I can smell myself too. I smell spicy and musky, just like my name.
And then, I see myself.
Sprawled around him. My dress is hiked up to the tops of my thighs, my pale skin is glistening under the light. I’m holding on to his shoulders like he’s going to save me from everything bad in the world.
When he is everything bad in the world.
In my world. Him.
But what shocks me more than anything is that he’s… hard. His dick is hard and it’s pressed up against the most intimate part of me.
The bulge in his jeans is right up at my wet panties and I like the weight of it, the heat of it.
“I don’t. I don’t… want to…”
Finally, Zach stops and looks into my eyes and a tear breaks free, streaming down my cheek.
His thumb wipes off that tear with such tenderness that a few more shake loose and follow its path.
“You don’t wanna feel this way, do you?”
I shake my head. “No. Not for you. N-not for someone who…” I swallow as the words rip out from somewhere very, very deep inside of me. “Someone who makes me hate. Someone who doesn’t let me move on and let go. You change me. I don’t know how you do that but you change me into a worse version of myself.”
Something goes off in my chest, then. A bomb of memories.
Memories of that night three years ago when I said all sorts of things to him: the prom night.
You know how in love, you become a better person? You make me a worse person, Zach. I’ve never hated anyone the way I hate you. You’re nothing but a big, fucking bully. That’s all you’ll ever be. I’ll never forgive you for what you did tonight. For all the things you’ve done before. I’ll hate you till the day I die…
Zach breathes through his nose, clenching his teeth. “Yeah. I do, don’t I? So next time when I tell you to stay away from me, you do that. If I look at you, you look the other way. If you see me walking down the corridor, turn around and take a different route. Because the next time I see you in front of me, I’ll take it as an invitation. If you keep throwing yourself at me, I’ll snatch you up. And I’ll make you pay for it on your goddamn back.”
Zach rips his touch away and steps back.
I snap my thighs closed and jump down from the counter. My tears won’t stop falling and the last thing I see is the agitated plow of his hand through his hair.
Then, I’m running away from him. From his room. From the place he grew up in. The place with seven towers and a glass window that you can see the stars through.
I tear open all my bandaged wounds as I run and run. For miles and hours. Until I reach the house that I grew up in.
I make my way in through an open window in the kitchen and climb the rickety stairs up to my room.
Then I curl up on the floor and sob.
When I was about seven, I made my parents a card for their anniversary.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I guess I wanted to impress them. I wanted to show them that I was normal, like any other kid.
I wanted them to be proud of me.
But I guess that was too much to ask.
My dad took one look at the card and his face scrunched up. I remember him crumpling it in his hands and throwing it in the fire.
“You’ll always be an illiterate freak, won’t you?”
I didn’t know the meaning of illiterate but from his expression and the way he chugged down the whiskey in his glass in one go, made me think that it wasn’t a good thing.
I remember my mother barging in and trying to console him. “It’s okay, Ben. We have the best tutors. With practice, by this time next year, you won’t even know –”
“That he’s defective?” My dad clenched his teeth. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe I shouldn’t have married you. Because I know it isn’t me. I know I am not making him slow. It didn’t take me that long to learn how to write.”
I watched my mom cry at that, and then my dad turned to me. “Go to your room and stay there. No food for you until you can spell your fucking name right.”
I don’t remember much after that. I remember screaming – my parents fighting, and I know Nora snuck some food into my room later that night.
She loved the card I’d made. She even told me that she loved me.
I never said it back. I never said I love you too. Something made me clam up. Maybe the fact that she was looking at me with pity, or it could be that I never believed her.
Even though by that age, I understood that that was what you did, when someone said I love you.
That was why I had it on the card.
On the card, I’d written I love you, Mom and Dad, along with my full name; I’d been practicing a lot, getting the hang of the letters just right.
I was expecting them to say it back to me, but I guess I messed up the letters and there went my I love you too.
In my defense, I was seven. I was pathetic. I was still trying to win my dad’s approval by trying harder, being good, making stupid cards.
I’m not anymore.
I don’t need love. I don’t need acceptance or approval. I reject them before they can ever reject me.
But Blue’s different. She’s still naïve. She thinks love is this amazing, magical thing. She wants to fall in it.
It’s funny how people forget that it’s called falling in love. There’s a reason for that. You fall and you break your fucking leg and you bleed. That’s what love is. Bleeding, cutting yourself open on purpose.
It’s a weakness to be that crazy, that you’ll hurt yourself for someone else. Or that you’ll love someone despite how much they’ve hurt you.
But whatever.
She’s not my problem.
Though I will admit that I acted foolishly tonight. I knew it was a mistake. The moment I made up an excuse to ruin her date.
Honestly, I have no clue why I did that. Maybe I was just doing her a favor. That Ryan guy isn’t for her. He isn’t man enough to be with her.
But maybe I should’ve let them go. Maybe Blue needs a little heartbreak in her life to get the real picture.
I look at the bed where I found her asleep, her blue hair sprawled out on my pillow.
And then, there are her sandals: also blue and caked with tiny droplets of her blood. There are little indentations where her toes and her heel dug into the cheap plastic.
Fuck.
No wonder she was bleeding. And she’s going to bleed even more because she ran away from here barefoot.
Gritting my teeth, I crush her sandals in my hands and stride over to the closet. Opening the door, I throw them in and shut it back with a bang.
My cock is hard as fuck. Harder than it’s ever been.
I jump into the shower and try to clean off the feel of her. I try to clean off her scent, her softness.
And when the memory of her becomes too much, I pull at my cock.
I hear her words in my head: I don’t want to… Not by someone who makes me hate.
Tears have never been my thing. But still, I jerk off to her.
I beat it, pull it, tug it, until I’m spraying cum all over the tiled wall, thinking about her blue hair and her sugar smell.