The Boy in Black

T W E N T Y - F O U R

He didn't let fear take over him like most children did when he was younger. He didn't hide under his blanket when he imagined a shadow, for he was the shadow, and he had only just begun to frighten himself.

He remembered looking in the mirror a lot when he turned ten years old. He remembered tracing his fingers across his face and jawline, watching how his features were getting stronger month by month, even if he sometimes was just imagining it.

He wanted to grow up, he wanted to be stronger than anybody else. And he vowed that he would be as he looked at his reflection with a straight posture and clenched fists.

That year he found out the pleasure of getting off by his own hand, and the phase of doing exactly that passed at age thirteen when he began to let other girls do it for him. They would be his age usually, maybe a year or two older.

Jaxson has always been a good looking child. Cute dimples, chocolate brown hair and freckles on his nose, anything would point to him being a perfect child just by the looks of him. However, as he grew the small town he lived in began to wonder about the boy that used to skip around with his friends in the large field with the aging oak tree.

Ever since Jaxson had taken the life of a young girl with one simple push and labeled it as an accident to the public, he begun to sit in the dark and look at his reflection more often than usual.

His mother and father noticed before they left, and knew something was up when he began to want nothing more than black T-shirt's for Christmas instead of an Xbox like most other boys his age wanted.

They didn't stay long after Jaxson began blasting music and throwing things against his bedroom wall.

Like most parents, they would assume this was a phase and it would pass. But his parents, however, packed up and left just months after he began doing so, as if waiting anxiously to have the the perfect reason to bolt.

Little did they know though that it was simply a phase, for now that he was seventeen all he enjoyed was the silence of his own room other than deafening loud music.

His favorite music now, however, was Mattie and the way she spoke and danced. It was the way her lips moved when she says his name, the way she smiled at him when he would give her one of his billions of compliments that he had stored inside of his head, the way she was his and still is.

Mattie thought of Jaxson this way as well, only not as extreme. She loved him, loved the way that he loved her and how he wasn't afraid to
show everyone that he was dating the girl that was invisible to everyone else but his own eyes.

She knew she was nothing special. Nothing even close compared to the other girls around her High School. She sometimes wondered what made Jaxson get drawn to her in the first place.

Mattie knew it couldn't have been her body that caught his attention, simply because of her figure that she personally thought needed some work. However, that thought disappeared each time she imagined Jaxson placing his lips against her stretch marks just like he always did each time they made love, and she knew each time that it happened that she was in love with the boy in black.

He was reeling her in steer by steer, and her oblivious mind let him, for she has never been in love before and knew not of the dangers of it.