All My Sins

A Depth

A bleak morning sun shyly lit the bedroom. His apartment had seemed so loud the night before, full. Even too full at some point. Yet Marshall felt the hollowness of his apartment the moment he opened his eyes.

Looking round, he found his phone on the floor. He could not remember saying goodnight to Maureen, and hoped that her own phone was concealed. The thought had not yet crossed his mind, if Jillian were to have found the phone. M&M, he had labeled his contact. He began to guilt himself that it would be too obvious. She obviously didn't have a phone for a reason. If only he could understand why.

Marshall felt as though he were only seeing her from behind plate glass. While he hated these intrusive thoughts, the worst of them all came when he gazed at himself through the mirror's glass.

She's too young. Marshall could see the reflection of younger versions of himself. Scars of his childhood that aged his premature face into that of a man's. He saw now invisible tears that coated his cheeks and burned like acid rain. For longer than necessary, Marshall sat on the floor of his bathroom, picking at loose pieces of green tile and contemplating how children could be corrupted. The hate that fueled his dispositions as a child had seeped into his being and poisoned him into an equal monster.

He found reason in rhyme and established that he would always try to be better. To be the kind of person he wished for there to be as a child, to be good. The kind of man he could not even imagine his own father to be, yet he had so brutally thrust himself into Maureen's life and taken advantage of her in ways he regretted.

He remembered bending her over his desk and had to shut his eyes, no longer able to bear his reflection. She was good, and yet he failed to recognize it and feared that he had corrupted it.

Marshall had always known it was forbidden, wrong to become involved with an underage girl, one of his students. He had known from the start, but now his heart strings were tied in knots round her fingertips. In love with the reality of meeting someone just as passionate about something as he was. Of course it would never be too late to dismiss this relationship, to turn himself in and rot away somewhere. But what would happen to her then?

-

"Maureen?" Jillian shook Maureen awake.

"Hmm? Hmm?" Even in the dull morning light clouded by her curtains, Maureen's eyes felt unusually sensitive to it.

"Wake up. I'm going- God, you look awful. Take some of your medicine. Come on, get up."

The moment Maureen sat up in bed, her heart stilled. Her cellphone was nowhere in sight, nor could she feel it under her pillow. Though her head was finally clear again, she felt groggy. 

"Monica called me this morning." She stated flatly, as she closely watched Maureen sip down a pill.

But Maureen had forgotten all about that part of the previous night. She stayed quiet and waited for her Mother contiue.

"John was mugged last night."

"What?" Her stomach twisted and her mind electrocuted.

"You were supposed to take him home, Maureen. What in god's name happened last night?"

"Are you serious right now?" Cheeks beginning to warm and the feel of her mucles tightening began to warp Maureen's vision. "He wasn't mugged! I kicked him out of the car no more than a few blocks from their house because he kept touching me! He's disgusting!" She could hear her Mother's condesension as if her fit were over the likes of an elementary crush.

"You don't make someone who's been drinking walk the street in the middle of the night."

It was too early for a fight like this, and Maureen knew that she would have to bear the loss of it either way. There was no winning. There was no defense. Only a low-burning fire at the depth of her belly.