I shouldn’t have done it, it wasn’t right, it didn’t matter she’d be eighteen in a month, i was twenty two

I shouldn’t have given in, but i did

I gave into her sweet smiles, her warmth, her touch, her sounds, her body, every fucking thing, i took it like the greedy bastard i am

Currently, she’s naked under my covers, sweat on her forehead as she rests on top of me lazily, i run my thumb over her hip in circles, watching here eyes flutter closed

Damn it, she’s doing shit to me she has no business doing, i don’t do soft, I’m not soft

I’m a fucking psycho, no kidding, i mean, sure, not a psychopath, more like a sociopath, i guess that’s what happens when you witness your father murder your mother right in front of you at eight years old

I tell myself that’s the story, anyway. A neat little explanation I can keep folded in my pocket, pull out when people get too close. Broken kid grows into broken man. Makes it easier to swallow.

Her breathing evens out, slow and trusting, like she hasn’t learned the rules yet. Like she doesn’t know that people like me don’t get to keep things that feel this… human. My thumb keeps moving, muscle memory betraying me, tracing a softness I pretend not to need.

The ceiling stares back at me, blank and accusing. I remember another ceiling once—cheap plaster, stained brown—and the sound of my mother choking on words she never finished. Funny how the body remembers before the mind does. My chest tightens, a pressure I hate, because pressure turns into feeling, and feeling turns into weakness.

She shifts, murmurs my name like it belongs to her. That’s the dangerous part. Not the sex, not the heat still clinging to our skin—but the way she says it, like she sees something worth calling back.

I swallow and still my hand, she feels it, of course she does, looks up at me with those big doe Bambi eyes

“Hey,” she whispers, soft as a truce.

No demands. No fear. Just presence. Like she’s offering me a choice I never learned how to make.

I snort quietly, a humorless sound. “You should sleep,” I say, rougher than I mean. Distance, that’s the move. Always has been.

She doesn’t argue. She never does. She just studies my face like it’s a language she’s trying to learn, then nestles closer, cheek warm against my chest. Her arm drapes over me, casual, intimate, like it’s the most natural thing in the world

Truth is, I’ll never love her

I just can’t, I might obsess over her, I might claim her, fuck her, hold her afterwards, but it’ll never be out of love

I’m not capable of that feeling, of any feeling, really

Something broke in me that night, as i watched my father kill the only person who’d ever loved me

Or maybe it didn’t break.

Maybe it’d never been there in the first place

She shifted again, burying my face in my neck, breathing me in

I hated when she did that

I hated that I didn’t hate it at all