Black Temptation

Chapter 30

It's morning and she is.so.beautiful. How can she be? It is not only the fact that throughout my twenty something years of leaving scars, I have never fathomed the level of beauty a woman can capsulize so blindly. Yet, I would have not been so picky with her facial features when my main focus was not her literal head. But it's also the unattainable fact she was locked in with a racing house fire and emerged with only minor disruptions. The doctor said it's a miracle she got out alive and a god sent that nothing but her house was burned to death.

And as she sleeps, carelessly atop my sheets, her sores seem to be disappearing at every moments notice. Reminding me of her intangible observation of when love is in play, the right things happen at the right time. So, it is my bed that is the right bed, in the right house, with the right girl, sleeping on her right side, who occasionally rubs her nose with her right hand and yet, in my right mind, I feel just as unworthy just to be in her presence. Even as she sleeps. With no awareness of my being. I am lucky, but she is infinite.

I can't help but stare. Beautiful rosé lips. Eyelashes that shade her face. Dark chestnut curls which fan her pillow are only the tip of the iceberg in which her beauty still struggles to congest itself into. And as I sit with my hands on my lips, however overjoyed as her chest rises and falls, I can only repeat the heinous events that required my pain to be felt and the selfish matter in which I understood them.

I rejected my feelings like she rejected hers. The difference is my break down has lasted my entire life. It has dictated my ways. My whereabouts make me who I am.

I'm a butch. Of the worst. But she doesn't even know the half of it. If I , almost a decade later, still deny myself the simple pleasures of laughing without hesitation and thinking without fear, what does that say about me? She wouldn't have broken down like that if she had dealt with her mother's death like she should've. But I am a fool to not use what she has taught me. To not keep denying myself the sugar sweet exquisiteness of what I think I feel. She did and is living the years of her life with opens wounds.

When she wakes up. I promise, to myself as to her, to be a better man and a better person. That attests to testifying my secrets and being well equipped for objection. Hopefully, my struggle will inspire her to release more of her.

My he-. My heart. Is open. It's uncomfortable, new, but necessary.

The sheets rumble resulting in my attention residing in another area. She jolts up, eyesight claimed by the darkness until she stretches, those beautiful arms, and opens her eyes. A second time in my bed and her panties aren't ripped on the floor. New record.

"Good Morning, beautiful." I alert myself for her every will. She moans and grabs her head.

"What is it with your bed and these paralyzingly headaches I get? I swear somebody rufied your sheets." I stare, unsure of what to say. It's probably her body reacting so viciously to the hunger.

"Here, have something to eat." I pick up the breakfast that sits on an appropriately leveled stool and sit perpendicular to her."You must be hungry."

She stares at me as if I told her her dog died.

"I'm a lot of things, but hungry is not one of them."

I start to stir the broccoli cheddar soup around with the spoon and she looks at it with somber distaste.

"C'mon. You have to eat something. That headache is because you're body is eating itself. Please," I hold the spoon up to her face, "eat."

She stares at me longer, seeing if I'll back down. When I don't, her mouth has no choice but to save itself further embarrassment of rejecting something it truly craved and grab ahold of the spoon.