Peroxide (Peterick)

when I said reinvent love I didn't mean this

Out of all the things I should be pondering, the topic of Dallon's gloves is the one that snares me, tosses my mind into oblivion with a prompt giggle and the release of an autonomous finger.

The ceiling staring down at me is a cue to goad my mind into thinking about the gloves — their texture, their gloomy color, their audacity to slither across terrains such as the bar and abduct my attention so thoroughly.

Dallon told me once that he hated wearing gloves, as they made him feel like a criminal who was supposed to shepherd their touch into a meadow of surreptitiousness, and he never thought that he could carry out something illegal, not in a million years.

But now that he did, it's appropriate, and the gloves are the only things that cloak the intrusive fingers who caused it — it's almost like he's ashamed.

No, that can't be. He knows what he did, but...when I saw him at the bar, he was oblique in a misconstrued air of presumptuousness, and that's his approach wrapped into his new personality, so whatever secrets mummified in his mind are now only dwindling.

It's a pity Dallon refuses to remember the extirpation he inflicted on a world that was comprised of just me, a lonely drifter until this guy immigrated to my perception, because my life practically revolves around it, and when my fellow citizens celebrate the gyration of the Earth around the sun, another gyration alleges to be more significant, and I accept its requisition.

The simple fact is that this event consumes my time, my social life, my sanity, and it's a bittersweet taste that I nevertheless swallow, because I have to do so in order to spare the people around me from the terror.

The same people I try to save maintain an aversion towards my kind, but Dallon never did, and maybe that's why this individual drag on a cigarette was particularly arduous to breathe away, but then it was like becoming asthmatic when he began to torment me, and my inhaler was hidden under the tender floorboards in the spot right below Dallon's foot, where it was left for dead.

But still, the mystery of his hand-wear remains in the atmosphere, and I might ask for some gloves of my own.

~~~~~

"Where are your mittens?" My hands furl around the threshold, apprehension galvanizing my fingertips as they gouge into the oak.

My friend is situated on the couch near the fireplace, the crackling of the flames hollowing his ears as a simpering rose lights his cheeks.

Pete's vision departs from his book as it balances on his thumb, disengaging his legs from under him. "My mittens?"

My feet scrape the floor, an anxious tilt in my gait. "Yeah, didn't you bring any?"

"Did you not?" Pete shifts further, withdrawing his finger from the middle of the book to devote his engrossment to me.

"I probably left them at the club."

Pete is unconvinced, but he knows better than to investigate me. "Check my bag. It's in my room."

Without a word, I abscond from the area, leaving Pete in startled astonishment before he can call back to me about how someone such as myself could be so foolish.

By some luck, I am drawn towards his room, the nearest to the threshold from which I entered, and the knob incarcerates my will to avoid my compulsion, so it's flicked once left and once right before I close myself inside the strawberry field of Pete's room.

His satchel lounges on the wooden tiles, zipper and flap diverging from halfway around and revealing a plethora of colors from products within the bag.