Eternal Longing ✓

8. Night Out

JAYA

My earliest memory is holding a tiny brush to a canvas and slicing the white in half with a simple, belligerent stroke of paint.

Tears streaming down my face, I repeated the motion another time until the emotions within me quelled to a dull ache in the back of my skull.

The decision-to tear open the painting materials that my mother had bought me-was purely motivated by the spite of a five-year-old.

I was angry at the world, at myself, at the fact that I wasn't-couldn't-be good enough. My mother's words reminded me of the fact. My dad's disappointment at my inability to satisfy my mom confounded the fact.

I was a bland, too-tall, five-year-old girl with a malfunctioning heart and a bad habit of driving my mom to tears no matter how hard I tried to be good.

It wasn't all my fault, though. I simply wanted to run, to yell excitedly along with the other kids, to be free to laugh until my belly hurt.

I wanted to feel my heart pounding in my chest for once in my life. Just one time would be enough to quench my curiosity.

But maybe I didn't need to go outside to feel that. Maybe my hands were all I needed to feel my heart racing.

With every stroke of dark blue paint on the white expanse, the pain reduced but the rhythm of my pulse increased.

At that moment, I discovered something. I'd discovered that to feel alive, to feel just as normal as everybody else, I just had to pick up my brush and stroke.

My mother rejoiced at the sight of my interest in something as cultured as art, patting her own back for buying the art supplies months before my little rebellion.

Back then, I smiled at her happiness. Not only glad to be doing something right for once, but also because she didn't know the truth.

She didn't know that painting made my heart pound just as much as running down the hill along the neighborhood kids would have.

Right now, as I tip back my first shot of the night, I grin at another thing she doesn't know. If she could see her dear daughter so close to alcohol and the debauchery in this club, she'd pass out.

Despite my desire for rebellion and freedom, I'm not planning on getting drunk tonight. Not only is it a bit reckless for my heart, but the last time I rebelled and got drunk, Finley was there.

It was at his friend's pool party, and it was before I knew what lay underneath and before he showed me the truth. He'd taken care of my blabbering self. The memory of the heat of his hands on my flesh still causes goosebumps to break out on my skin.

I think that's the very first time I truly noticed how attentively he watched me. I'd always written him off throughout our years in high school together because of his supposed dating preferences.

But that night, I saw it. I saw the predator. I felt it, even. It was subdued, resting, but it was there all the same. I somehow got the unsettling conviction that he'd been watching me for longer than that night.

My drunk brain didn't fully grasp it as I looked into his eyes, yet I still felt it all over me. The possessiveness and complete immersion, as if he was trapped in a house of mirrors and all he could see was me.

Even then, the first week of senior year, I got the sense that he didn't fully like it. He didn't enjoy the way he couldn't see anything else yet was unable to fight the intrinsic longing.

Weeks later, I realized just how much the lack of control over his desires for me pissed him off. And sadly, I got off on it so much.

So fucking much that even the thought of his burning gaze is enough to make me squirm uncomfortably in the middle of a bouncing nightclub.