Page 36 of Equilibrium
“He laid a claim on you which means that none of the other guys can even look at you. Don’t fuck this up.” With that, he let go of me, leaving me standing in the middle of the beach while everyone else started gathering around the bonfire.
He fucking laid a claim on me? What was this, the fifteenth century? Since when do we lay claims on people as if they were cattle? I already got branded by one motherfucker, now Storm wanted to hold me here as if I was Rapunzel in a tower.
I tried locating him in the sea of people, and when my eyes landed on the broad shoulders in the leather jacket and the dark hair messed by the wind, I knew where I needed to go.
When I was a little kid,I wanted to be a Superman. I thought flying would be the best feeling ever, being free like a bird, and if I could be strong like him, nothing and nobody could ever hurt me. I learned the hard way that I could never be free, at least not after everything they did to me. The sickness they possessed spread across my skin, day after day, night after night, until the only thing left was a body.
My cage.
A vast space. No feelings, no pain, no love, and no sorrow. I shut it all down. Endless nights I’d spent crying, begging for someone to save me. Days that felt like years, with their hands on me, touching me, taking away pieces of my sanity. I would’ve closed my eyes, but they wanted me to watch.
They wanted me to see what my presence did to them. When I stroked their dicks, when I touched their cheeks, when they broke me piece by piece. They wanted me to see it all, to feel their insanity.
I thought that monsters had claws, sharp teeth, and red eyes that glowed in the dark, but I was wrong. Monsters lived inside of us. They didn’t hide under the bed or in your closet. No, they resided in our chests, and they spread their tentacles throughout our bodies, like vine leaves, but you could never cut them down.
You can’t kill poison with another poison.
I tried. I tried to kill it. I tried to run. I tried to fix what they broke, but I was too late. When my cries stopped, when my eyes adjusted to seeing the horrors every day, for years, that was when I knew that nobody would save me.
No one cared.
My chest felt so heavy, I sometimes thought it would cave in on itself, but it didn’t. I was left to live this life, reliving it all each and every day. They didn’t break my body, but they broke my mind. Behind the closed lids, I could still see their sinister smiles. I could still smell the cologne they wore.
I could still feel their hands on my shoulders, on my back. Like ghosts they still haunt me to this day, and I don’t know how to escape them.
Or at least I didn’t.
The day I met Ophelia, that was the first day they weren’t screaming in my ear. When she touched me, instead of caving in, my chest expanded, my heart beat faster. I didn’t feel filthy.
I didn’t feel like an animal they made me out to be.
I learned how to survive, but I never learned how to live. At least not fully. I learned how to defend myself. I learned how to kill, how to torture. How to look a man in the eyes and kill him in cold blood.
But this, this feeling she evoked in me, this was foreign.
Alien.
I didn’t know what to do with it; I just knew I had to have her. And maybe, just maybe, the demons I saw in her eyes, maybe they would quiet with me. Maybe they would learn to coexist, and I could finally rest.
Maybe she could too. Her father was the cruelest man I have ever had a chance to meet. He was the Devil in disguise.
He could make you feel like you could trust him. He would make you drop your guard, and when you least expected it, he would strike. She grew up with him. She was trained by him. Those shadows, she wasn’t born with them.
The things I’ve heard about her, she wasn’t always like that. None of us were.
This fucked-up life made us who we were. Maybe it was destiny, maybe it was written in the stars for us, but whatever it was, neither one of us was born like this.
I wanted everything from her. Happiness, sadness, rage, pain, I wanted it all. I wanted to hold her close, so close that she would never want to leave.
But I also had to tell her the truth, and before I did that, I had to find out how to get out of the mess I got us all into.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Atlas heading my way, staring at the same spot I was looking at. The spot where Ophelia sat with Creed, talking with him more than she talked with me.
“Are you going to tell her?”
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question nowadays? Was I going to tell her how much I fucked up? I was, I just didn’t know how to broach the subject. I still had to call a doctor to look at her wounds, not to mention the fact that she seemed to be shaken more than I would’ve expected.
“Storm?”
