Periwinkle

33| SANITY OR DESTRUCTION?

As I gazed at her peaceful face while she slept, I wondered for the hundredth time how the fuck we got here. How the fuck I got here. I wondered how she could look so serene after setting my very being on fire. Her touch scorched like the first warm sun after a long, bleak winter, yet it didn't stop me from wanting to lay bare myself for her completely, to let her turn me into a heap of ash.

It was the middle of the night, and the moon cast a dim glow over her face, her features relaxed in sleep. Her long lashes brushed against her cheeks, her lips were slightly parted, and her dark hair splayed across the pillow, her naked form lying next to mine.

The sight of her so calm and vulnerable next to me, the feeling of her warm skin against mine, the faint scent of her shampoo that lingered in the air filled my chest with an unfamiliar warmth.

This was bad. Really, really bad.

It was so wrong and fucked up in so many levels, and I knew it. I knew I was a fucking moron for thinking that this would end any other way than badly. I was a fool, clinging to the embers of a connection destined to turn to ash.

And yet, here I was. Yet she seemed to keep my head sane whenever I was with her. She seemed like my anchor in the swirling fog of murky thoughts threatening to drown me every day.

Was she my sanity? Or was she my awaited destruction?

I didn't even know how I got here—watching her sleep, my thoughts consumed by her and everything we did tonight. I wanted to run my fingers through her hair, I wanted to trace the curve of her waist, I wanted to taste the sweetness of her skin, I wanted to hear her say my name again, I wanted to hear the sounds she made when I made her come.

But I couldn't.

Because if I touched her, she would wake up. If I kissed her, she would want more. And if I let her, she would break down every last bit of self-control I had. She would make me forget that this was a bad idea. She would make me forget why this couldn't happen again.

I had no idea how she made me forget. I had no idea how she made me forget, just like that, with just a single touch. She made me forget, just like that.

She made me forget.

Just like that.

My world before her has been a monotonous gray, a suffocating canvas painted in shades of gray. Each day bled into the next, each day blurred into nights, a suffocating routine of depressive thoughts gyrating around my head as I navigated a schedule that felt mechanical. Each day was a battle, a meticulous dance between the person I was expected to be and the one I wished to become in solitude. But the nights were the toughest. The hollowness echoed louder when the city slept. Every night was a war, a desperate struggle to reconcile the mask I wore for the world with the hollow emptiness gnawing at my soul.

Then she came, a whirlwind of color and vibrancy, shattering my composed self. She was a force of nature, shattering the carefully constructed walls I'd built around myself. She made me forget the ache within me. I didn't understand how or why. All I knew was that when she looked at me, when she touched me, when she was around me, the heaviness that always sat in the pit of my stomach didn't feel so heavy anymore. I didn't even know when that started happening. It had been just a few weeks, but somehow, she had worked her way under my skin and made me feel things I didn't want to feel. She had made me do things I didn't do.

And then, just a few hours ago, I was fucking her, and she was looking at me, and I felt... I didn't know what it was. But it felt... good.

She had turned my world upside down, shaken the foundations of my very being, and yet, here she slept tranquilly, unaware of the chaos she had unleashed within and of the storm beginning to rise within me.