I'd like to thank TekNight, my editor and friend, for saving me from stupidity with his keen eye for detail. Any flaws still in here are entirely my responsibility. Note for the reader: this story contains some resistance play. If that ain't your thing, feel free to read something else.
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Somewhere inside my head there's an animal constantly coming to grips with death. I'm sure of it. I can tell, because it keeps returning to the same place over and over again, like it lost something there. A horse mourning where it lost its companion, a salmon swimming to its birthplace to die, a dog returning to where his owner used to be. What's inside of them is inside of me. Instinctively it's replaying the events leading up to this, as if it can change the outcome, not able to accept the loss. I've got a mourning creature inside of me, but it ain't me. Because me, I wouldn't change a thing. I would do it all over again. Yes, I lost a piece of me, but I found something that completes me.
It all has to do with her. If you want to know everything, every painful detail - and that is why you're here, right? - then let me tell you about her. Maybe it was the first time I met her, but I don't think so. We've known each other for such a long time, since early in high school, that I cannot pinpoint where I started losing to her. Gradually, in the years we hung out together, the slow drip of discovering her liveliness, her quirkiness and her growing kinkiness polished a smooth hole my heart until it was hers. Pointless as it is to try and determine where it became irreversible – because I don't believe things are ever reversible - I keep wondering when it was that I realized I wanted her and would do anything to get her to want me. If only I had known what that would mean.
You want the truth, hm? O.K. I'll admit. I did know what it would mean. At least, I could've known, which I believe means I did know. The wild side of me, the instinctual part of me that uses my gut as a compass, it knew. And it went and pointed me in that direction anyway. It should not complain, I'm here because it wanted me to be.
"It'll never work out. He's too sweet." I remember her saying that, but I've forgotten who she was talking about.
We had been spending a lot of time like this, talking online. That dangerously safe feeling environment that distanced us enough to allow us to get closer and become more than the casual friends we were before. Irrevocably we reached that vulnerable level of talk about love and sex. The level where it instantly matters that you're a guy and she's a girl, even though you both pretend it doesn't matter. You circle around each other, predators, teasing and trying, determining whether it's possible to be just friends, or whether there will be a confrontation.
"I need someone who can counteract me," she said. "He can't handle me. I will walk all over him, and not in a good way..." She paused for a second. "Well, not in a way
he
would enjoy anyway."
It was nothing special, she'd said things like that before, but I remember suddenly seeing something I hadn't seen earlier. I was pretty sure this never had been a conversation about 'him' in the first place, whoever he was anyway. There it was, on the screen, daring me to ask what she meant, but I already knew.
Oh sure, you could definitely say I'd done enough to have had this coming. She couldn't get to me with her shit, and she couldn't stand that. It turned into an increasingly intense form of play fight she seemed to enjoy immensely, still it sometimes got us on the verge of a fight. These things tended to bleed into our real life encounters, with varied results. Friends said we hated to love and loved to hate each other, and it was true. She was a delicious challenge. If I ever knew a smart girl that was a real opponent, it was her. It was a turn on, especially when I'd manage to win. But by then the power balance seemed to have shifted a little. Now I would say I'd lost the race altogether already.
In retrospect she'd been dripping these little toxic drops of aggression mixed with sex, more and more, surreptitiously clouding my mind, poisoning my heart. I'd been more than slightly affected by the intimate things she shared with me, way before I saw it all had to do with me. Even then, I had made an effort to hide it, but my tendency towards brutal honesty turned against me and she smelled blood. She'd been prying me, testing me, getting bolder in subtle ways. And this one was aimed directly at my crotch. And this time, for the first time, I had no defense. The mental bruise she left that night made my crotch throb painfully as dark ideas swirled in my head.
From then on, our conversations became even less innocent, making my life harder. Gradually I started thinking up elaborate scenarios, to see what it could mean if she would "walk all over me", and it sparked the desperate urge in me to take revenge. At some point I pictured how her face would look with a sadist grin, or with desperate, pleading eyes, and I'd created a virus of the mind. Her pretty face, saturated with these dark desires, started haunting me during unexpected moments throughout the day. The only relief was the awareness she wanted me as well, even if it was just to toy with, like all the others. It amused and angered me at the same time and more often than not ended with me jacking off to a fantasy in which I did unspeakable things to her to make her pay.
I kept it all a secret from her, which is not to say she didn't know. With her having a mind like that, I was never sure anything could be kept hidden from her. It was a guilty pleasure of the most dangerous kind: it had the power to draw blood, leave scars, kill things, and it did. I'm not sure where we passed the point of no turning back – I'm convinced there is no turning back at all, ever – but if there were, we passed it somewhere in the long months that followed. It was an exhilarating game that was set up to end. Someday we would have to have this confrontation.
Things came to a head on the hot summer night G. celebrated his birthday and his resignation – or dismissal. Nobody was really sure which of the two it was. When we arrived, G. was getting slightly too hammered to ask, so I assumed the latter. She, however, flirted with him until she had an answer. It was an obscene sight, though nobody else seemed to object or even notice.
"What the fuck is up with the war paint and the body armor?" I asked her. I knew her as a girl who would usually go for stylish shirts with jeans. This dress was something else. And that make-up... I wasn't sure I liked this. All that effort. She was up to something.
She grinned. Her teeth looked extraordinarily straight and white and a little grotesque in the dim light of the garden. That luscious mouth of hers, it scared me, fascinated me. The warm air was thick with the heavy scent of flowers. The party crowd was moving inside again for some reason. I remember wondering whether that scent would stick to her hair, like cigarette smoke does. Could it linger on her all night, rub off on the pillow in her bed?
"So, you like it?"
"Don't you put words in my mouth, girl," I grinned back. "I've never seen you dress up like this. I'm asking who you've dressed up for."
Yeah, I know. She had my attention and she knew it. Maybe I shouldn't have said that, but I did. Looking back I see how bold and innocent I still was, how this whole game was getting the better of me, and how she must have seen it so clearly. I wanted her and I resented that. The sight of her calculatingly trying to entangle some other guy in her web, just to play with him for fun, was making me touchy. It made me want to kill him and punish her. I remember thinking that I was in the wrong frame of mind for a party.
"Is it G.? 'Cause, y'know, he's not the best catch tonight."
She and G. had flirted a little in the past. Being the honest ass that I am, I'd told her before in no uncertain terms what I thought of him.
"Oh really? Then who is?" she rebutted, with a playfully raised eyebrow.
"So it's G., huh?" I teased. It might've been the beers, but she took the bait.
"No, it's not G., you jealous motherfucker. What do you take me for? You know he's no match. Nice guy and all, but such a pushover", she winked.
And there it was again. That thing that pushed my button. Somehow, even though she did exactly what I wanted her to do, she'd gotten me exactly where she wanted.
