Striptease

Taken

[Charlie]

Love.

You never know what it is or if you have it until it's gone.

It's much like magic, a different kind of its own, one could say.

Love was magical to a certain extent, it broke past language barriers, transcended through genders and even broke the barrier of sound and the barricades of sight alone.

I was never one to say that I would experience love and at some point in my life, maybe I had.

Once or twice, perhaps.

But it never lasted.

Because it wasn't true love that I was experiencing.

Maybe it was lust.

A heated moment.

A shared glance.

The right touch on the shoulder.

The caress of one's fingers trailing down the side of a body.

And that may have felt like love at the love, and to others it could be love, but that wasn't it for me.

No, I wanted something real, something that I could almost see, smell and taste just as much as I could feel it deep within my soul.

Perhaps that's why it took me so long to find something as close to being called love, because I was so busy searching for things that weren't quite it, I got caught up in the madness and swept away by a sea of fake pleasantries and double edged lies that it wasn't until love was shoved right in my fucking face that I was finally able to see what I had been unknowingly searching for so long for.

Until my yázhí, my Everleigh, came into my life like a blazing, wracking force of nature.

Until she burned brighter than the sun and her beauty, her sarcasm, her wittiness and cleverness overpowered everything I could've ever thought would be possible for someone to have all bottled up in one large personality.

She was incredible, amazing, beautiful and as fragile as a delicate flower but she would never allow anyone close enough to hurt her.

Except for me.

She let me get close enough to her, so close that I could begin to understand the struggles that she was experiencing, the agony of not being able to trust anybody for the longest time, the suffering of wanting to do better and be better then the day before but simply never getting the chance or opportunity to.

By society's standards, I should be the last person qualified to understand where Everleigh was coming from, why she struggled so hard to open up to strangers or individuals that she didn't know if she could trust for life or not.

But I was the one person who could relate to her, sans Mikayla, that is.

And yet, despite my being able to understand where she was struggling the most in life, I still managed to fail and let her down.

I thought I could keep her from ever having to face rejection by simply isolating her, as if keeping her locked away in a metaphorical cage was the easiest and less harmful solution to the problem.

Oh, no.

I had severely fucked up and I knew I did so when she cursed me out, something that didn't feel easy to either of us and when her beautifully mismatched eyes blazed with anger and fury, I was more then a little bit pissed at myself for causing this riff between us.

Sure, Everleigh had withheld some information and I'll admit, I wasn't exactly pleased when I found out that she hadn't told me that she was going to start selling her products outside of our arrangement but I wasn't too angry about that, I wasn't even really mad that she hadn't told me.