Areston thinks he can shield me from his past, but what he doesn't realize is I'm already part of it.
The darkness that haunts him? It's the same one that's been chasing me for years.
I've given him everything-my body, my heart, my soul-and still...
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I know I didn't publish the whole week as I promised. I've been traveling and it has been super busy and super depressing a couple of days. I'm over it.
Here's updating a huge ass chapter of your favorite man! Enjoy!
oh, and thanks a lot for all the responses you gave on my previous update.
💗💗💗
Red.
I have always harbored a weird fascination with the color.
Red was the color of the dress my wife wore when we were kids and she made me watch Beauty and the Beast movie on a summer morning. The day I decided she was my Belle—my rose I'll keep protected in a glass dome just like the Beast did.
Those cherries we plucked together one summer in Puglia on her family estate when we were six were red. She didn't know how to pluck those so she used to end up crushing them, the red juices staining her small hands. Her giggles would fill the air as she would wipe her stained fingers on my white t-shirt and I would let her because the smears of red spoiling my favorite item of clothing didn't bother me as long as she was touching me.
The first ever item she baked in her easy bake oven—a red velvet cupcake—was red.
The tiny cardinal that had landed on my window one winter when I was 14 was red. The bright red feathers against the white snow had caught my attention. I wanted to cage it, keep it close so it would never leave my sight, just like I wanted to keep Belle caged so she would never go away from me.
As we grew older, red transformed into the color of the blinding fury that started brewing inside me at the thought of losing her to someone else. I couldn't stand the thought. While I didn't want to have her to myself, worried I might fuck it up as I was used to do to all things because nothing kept my attention once I claimed and marked it mine, I didn't want anyone else to have her either—to steal her attention that always held me at its center—to steal her away from me.
Red was the color of the blood I was prepared to spill without remorse to keep her mine. It was the color of raw power that would surge through me whenever I imagined the lengths I'd go to if anyone tried to take her away from me. Red became pulsing behind my eyes constantly. It consumed my thoughts, seeping into every damned corner of my head, further deepening my obsession and fixation for her that was already rooted deep within me.
Red was the color of her beautiful lips whether they were bare. Or when she started painting them with Chanel ruby woo lipstick at the age of 13. The color that promised equal measure of damnation and salvation. It drove me crazy, tempting me to claim it like an animal I'd understood by then I was. It used to fill me with a thirst I couldn't quench. A yearning I couldn't escape.
Red was the shade of the chaotic madness that consumed me when she left me. The color of the pain that twisted in my gut. The color of the blood I would spill in the underground street fights that had become my means to purge all the violence that had always lurked inside me but I had kept them suppressed– for her. Because she wanted Prince Charming. Not a monster who got high on watching people bleed, writhe from pain, and beg to be spared.
