BILLIE JEAN ( eddie munson.. ) ✔

017. Shot Through The Heart..

The nakedness helped them stick to each other much tighter than before, intertwined in everything that meant their fleshly form.

From the way she rested her head on his shoulder and he rested his own on top of hers, curving his posture just to lean into her again more, to the way their legs hooked on one another and their hands, even tired, wished to grasp ever the more, caressing and massaging out inertia wherever they reached with minimal movement, Billie and Eddie relaxed completely.

As soon as their breaths properly returned to normalcy, then faded a little further, Eddie whispered something about a ten minute nap.

He has been gently snoring in her ear for the past thirty minutes now.

Billie forced herself to stay awake though.

It wasn't that their time together, though an ecstasy unlike anything she's ever felt before, hasn't tired her bones and made her muscles ache in the slightest. It wasn't even Billie's selflessness, making her think that she could stay awake and protect them both.

No. There was no bravery in her stubbornness. Only fear.

Her eyes were wide open because the silence had grown again and into the dimmed lighting of her room, even without the cursed mirror present, she felt the exhale of the house, haunting her a chill of remembering specks and flashes from the worst of it all. She was terrorized only by the mere possibility that if she blinked a little longer, she'd see the Mirror Man again and God forbid she lowered her guard and heard that wretched voice once more.

The Mirror Man wasn't just a face or a decaying body. Billie was convinced the demon was the fleshed out product of loneliness, of despair, of the carnal sensation of helplessness in front of an inevitable end.

She held her right arm around Eddie and dug her fingertips into his bare skin a little more desperate to hold onto that feeling of safety he kept dragging through her nose and into her system just by being there with her. Desperate to push away again every single intrusive thought, Billie turned her gaze up at him and started the long process of admiration.

His features were so gentle and soft when he was sleeping. It wasn't a sight she got to see too often and it had become a simple vow that she ought to take full advantage of each time she'd be presented with the opportunity to see how lazily his curly hair fell over at least half his face. Up close, as they were, she could see what she had been feeling all night long as the tiny beginning of a mustache wanting to grow under his nose, despite how absolutely determined he's always been to keep a clean shave. His hair, ever rebellious.

No matter how amazed she was by his mellow snores and warm breaths, intoxicating the little air left between their still sweat-beaded bodies, Billie was purged by the bitterness of a tingle. Something left unsaid was stabbing her tongue in guilt, forcing poison down her throat until she hitched her breath and grimaced.

Why did she never tell him just how much she adored him...? She's known from the very first time she gave him a cassette. Part of her hoped he wouldn't return her feelings so it would save them both the pain, but oh, the other side of her was selfish back then. If anything, Billie has always just been scared of loving and like every single damn time, as if the movies never warned her, life gifted her exactly what she was afraid of most.

To get attached, to have another person added to the list of people she could not endure losing.

After her mother died, Billie had fought hard with her own mind to look at her family and not see the possibility that one day, she will be forced to watch them die too.

She adored Eddie Munson and if there really was such a thing as being made to love someone, then they had it; she felt it in her bones, she felt it in her soul, in the air that entered her lungs, in the blood that pumped a little more joyous each time he smiled and in the thoughts of him that kept her company whenever he was not around.