Finally, I have the one thing I think I’ve wanted from him all along.
Acknowledgment.
Awareness.
Fear…
Everything.
Greedy for more, I wrench my hand away and grapple for whatever part of him I can reach. His arms. His chest. The proof is in his thundering heartbeat—I’m the one making him stammer. Feel. React.
In a way, I couldn’t as a little girl; I have his full attention. He can’t turn away from me.
Not now.
“I said stop!” He shoves me back, but my limbs aren’t fully connected to my brain. I go sprawling, fighting for balance like a broken marionette.
“Shit.” He’s near me again, his hand hooking around my waist to keep me upright. Reluctantly, he does so, making me sit on the couch, but I grip him tighter, my nails digging into the flesh of his arm.
He hisses through his teeth but not because of the pain. Because I’m pulling him closer, rattling his unshakable balance. He has to grip the back of the couch to keep from crushing me, but maybe that’s what I want to feel? His full weight pinning me down. His full focus.
All of Donatello Vanici.
“Fucking, stop!” He scrambles away, rising to his feet, but something in my expression keeps his gaze riveted to my face. I can see into his mind again, gleaning one new insight after the other. Horror. Disgust. More horror.
Because I’ve figured out exactly what it is I want from him.
His touch. His taste. I want him to mark me, and I don’t even care how. It isn’t fair that he’s the one with the scars to show for his pain.
I want a token of my suffering, too—a reminder to truly hate him for. To know deep in my soul that I mattered enough to scratch. Even to make him leave something behind that time can’t erase.
I want him to hurt me.
I need him to.
And I can see it written all over his face, finally out in the open—it’s the one thing he can’t give me. How else can he play the victim if I’m the one left bleeding?
“Stop.” He wrenches away, turning his back to me, and I go limp. Boneless. His rejection shouldn’t affect me the way it does. Like the world has been sucked away. In the absence of his warmth, I’m alone, but it’s a loneliness that extends beyond the physical.
It goes deeper into my soul, unearthing something that perhaps is a figment conjured by the alcohol in my system. Or maybe I always knew but never wanted to face it.
I never hated him because he left, or because of his betrayal. My entire life has been a series of betrayals—that isn’t what hurt. What’s festered all these years until I can feel it consuming me from the inside out.
He took away my ability to hate. To love. To fear—and feel anything at all while knowing that someone understood me unequivocally. Sign language, or music, or the desire to speak at all was irrelevant around him. Until he left. The monster took my voice away.
He made me feel silenced for the first time in my life, and I’ve been suffocating in that silence for seven long years. I never loved him—I understood him in the deepest, most primal sense of the word, a language that transcends all others. Through him, I could finally accept the twisted, hateful parts of myself I’d grown to fear…
And he stole that from me. He took away the girl I was, his precious Safiya, and he smothered her. Denied me of her. He consumed her.
And it’s a crime I can never forgive.
I know now that only one form of retribution can even begin to cover the cost of what he took from me—him. All of him. Those parts of him he’s sworn never to let me have. Those broken slivers of his soul he’s squirreled away all these years. Through those scattered pieces, I can finally take back the only thing I’ve ever wanted from him. Needed.
Myself.
“Don’t do this to me,” he says in a voice I’ve never heard before. It’s an animal’s howl, so pained and broken in its utterance that it might not be words at all. A moan. A plea.
A mercy, but one he never afforded to me.
“Don’t…”
Don’t make him look at me and see the tears streaming down my face uncontrollably. Don’t make him stay when every fiber of his being is urging him to run. Don’t make him face the creature he’s made of me.
A broken woman who can barely stand up. Who staggers to him like a starving creature and grapples for whatever part of him she can reach.
This time, he surrenders, falling back against the couch, and I’m the predator for once.
His heat is my nourishment. I can’t get enough. Skin on skin. His breath hot on my neck. His body motionless as I claw open his shirt and run my fingers across the bare flesh beneath.
It’s terrifying how you can hate someone so much. Revile them.
And crave the feel of them at the same damn time. My fingers trace him like living beings in their own right, seeking to devour every inch of him. To memorize the scars, too numerous to count, some noticeable only by feel. A surface-level scratch made by something sharp. A deeper, rougher wound that probably took weeks to heal. And finally…
The jagged marks he made himself, spelling out my name as proof of what he tried to ignore. I live in him, this person I’ve never let myself truly be in seven years. Petty Safiya. Hateful. Vengeful.
But all those good things, too, that I’ve strived to recall. The joy of sitting quietly in the peace I only ever found around him. The confidence that I no longer had to hide or pretend. I was an open book, and it had felt so good to finally just
