𝐋'𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐥 𝐝𝐮 𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞

Chapter 12: Satan's Confession

Not a minute passes that you believe you can get up. The guilt keeps you ill on the floor, and William stays with you waiting out his injury. You waited at least 10 minutes for him to leave, but he didn't.

No matter what feelings he harbors for you now, he stays in your presence. Everything is iced over, it's done. It feels that way until you hear a very simple question, one you have an answer for.

"You said you cared, but what else." His voice is hoarse, with a difficult tone.

It's not the heartbroken melody you expect, but a quiet baritone.

"What else, what else do you want?"

"I want you to love me, to feel how I do, I just can't let it happen, I don't deserve you."

'He loves you, he wants your love.'

The idea is otherworldly, though you had seen crazier. Why didn't he think he deserved you, because he was a terrible person?

To you, he was a saint by your standards, the standards you upheld were profane. It angered you, you think he thought of you better. Both of you deserved whatever purgatory came after death, and side by side you would be.

"And why don't you deserve me," you sniffle between words, slightly choked up, "what is there to deserve?"

"There's a lot, there's a warm hearth at the end of a cold street, and a familiar presence that fills me with pride."

"And... there's something else, it's a beautiful man inside that bliss he created, one he refuses to believe is a heaven."

"Perhaps to him it's a prison, but for moments there's something in his eyes that says differently, a glaze of the most glorious eyes that ever gazed at me. Those eyes fill me with every emotion, they let me heal myself into something of a person again."

"With each passing day, I imagine that man to be an angel of a god I don't believe in, but I see he's greater because he knows of me, to the extent I'd go for things and he helped me."

"At the end of it all, he was just a human like me years ago. He wanted to be loved and just held, and I used him out of stupidity, then I think he betrayed me. I'm not sure he did now, and even if he did I know I wouldn't leave.

"I love him too much for if I did I think my existence would cease."

You can't think of anything, you hang on to every word, taking it as a gospel. Some of it can be amounted to obsession, you don't care.

You're finally loved, it's not what you wanted exactly. Yes you wanted to have someone to love, to hold and have. This felt different in the best way possible.

You didn't find love, you found companionship. That could be the same as life to others but it was different to you. Perhaps it was the way you two were both men, finding every part of yourself in your partner in a prejudiced world.

Or it was finding someone of the same mindset that drove this foreign feeling. A tenderness to your soul, and a torture to your body was what you found. It could tear you apart and kill you, and that's all you needed.

"You love me?"

"I think I always did, even when I didn't know it yet."

Sensations come back to you, first you feel the tears pouring down your face, and then the coldness of the tile, making you lift your palms off it. Knees move with you as you crawl your way to his side, resting in front of him. It felt warmer that way in some weird way.

"William, you know how I feel about you. I love you too, and I hated it, I think it's okay now."

"Say that again, his voice is softer than before, tell me how much you love me, please."