Switch Blade Romance

Guilt.

February 14th, 2015

Andrew Grant lay with his legs jammed against the weeping concrete, blood pooling thick in his temples until the basement inverted itself and the ceiling became the floor of his own skull. He hummed—three cracked notes, looped, a prayer he no longer believed in. The sound lived in his throat like a trapped moth beating against glass. If he stopped, the silence would swallow him whole.
Don’t think about the time. Don’t count. Counting makes it real. Seven thousand heartbeats since Charles last left? Fourteen? A million? Stop. Stop stop stop. You’ll go mad counting. You’re already mad. No. Not yet. Not all the way. There’s still a piece of you left that knows this is wrong. Hold it. Hold it like a knife in the dark.
Charles descended like clockwork—every forty-eight hours, give or take the drift of Andrew’s fractured perception. The stairs groaned under his weight the way a house groans when it’s deciding whether to collapse. Charles sat. Always too close. Soap smell. Under it, metal. Under that, something older, like wet pennies left in a corpse’s mouth.
“You could be upstairs right now,” Charles murmured, fingertips walking the chain links like piano keys. “Sun on your face. My arms. A life. All you have to do is say yes. One word. Yes. That’s all I’ve ever wanted from you.”
Say it. Say yes. End this. The dark is eating you in small bites. You can feel the edges fraying—your thoughts have teeth now. Say yes and the teeth stop chewing. Say yes and maybe he’ll let you breathe without tasting rust. Say yes and you’ll never have to hear the furnace door again. Say yes and you’ll be the monster who chose the monster. No. No no no. If you say yes you kill the last clean thing inside you. You become him. You become the hand that held the knife. You become the one who left La’Laurie bleeding on the rug while you walked away. Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it.
Andrew nodded instead. Nodding was safe. Nodding kept the knife in the basket for one more day.
The rats were bolder now. The big brown one—Micha, he’d named it without wanting to—sat on the cot’s edge most nights, grooming itself with fastidious paws, staring. Its eyes were black coins reflecting Andrew’s shrinking face back at him.
You think I don’t see you watching? You think I don’t know you’re waiting for me to break so you can crawl inside the hole I leave? Go ahead. Bite. Take a piece. There’s less of me every hour anyway. Maybe if you eat enough there won’t be anything left for Charles to love. Maybe that’s mercy.
He drifted once—never deep sleep, only a shallow, feverish skim across unconsciousness—and felt the warm weight settle across his throat. Fur. Whiskers. A small, frantic heartbeat.
Lay Lay. Oh God, baby girl. You came back. You forgave me. You always forgave me. Remember how you’d nose under the blanket and press your cold nose to my ribs until I laughed? Remember how you trusted me?
The sweetness bloomed, bright and lethal.
Then memory gut-punched him: the living-room floor. Red ropes spilling from her belly. Charles’s calm voice. “She’s already gone, baby. We have to go.” Andrew’s feet moving. Leaving her. Leaving her eyes open and staring after him.
He woke screaming. The thing on his neck was the rat. Heavy. Fearless. It stared down with eyes that knew every secret he’d ever tried to bury.
He hurled it. It hit the wall. Squealed—a sound too big for its body.
You left her. You left her and you left Micha and you left Patrick and every time you open your mouth to Charles you leave another piece of yourself behind. How many pieces until there’s nothing left to leave? How many until you’re just the shape of a man Charles keeps in the dark?
Next visit, Charles brought the laptop. Flowers. A wilted promise.
“Date night,” he said, smiling the smile that fit too tight across his teeth.
Andrew stared at the ceiling cracks. They were spreading. They looked like the map of every vein he still had left.
The screen glowed. Wi-Fi bars blinked once—green, mocking—before Charles shut the lid. There’s a signal. There is a door out. Thin. Invisible. But real. If you can reach it. If you can keep enough of yourself together to remember it exists. If the guilt doesn’t eat you first.
Later—after Charles had taken what he wanted, after he’d curled around Andrew like a python digesting a rat, after he’d whispered “I love you” and left—Andrew lay listening to his own breathing turn ragged.
The furnace gave a low metallic sigh.
The door eased open.
Not wide. Just a crack.
A single charred paw emerged—small, fur still clinging in blackened patches. La’Laurie’s paw.
She dragged herself out: ribs showing through singed hide, one eye a cloudy marble, the other gone. Tail dragging wet intestines like a broken leash.
She climbed the cot. Settled on his chest—weightless, impossibly heavy.
Her muzzle pressed to his ear.
“You left me,” she whispered, voice half-puppy, half-gravel. “You could have stayed. You could have held my guts in your hands until they stopped moving. But you let him pull you away. You chose him over me. Over all of us.”
Andrew’s lips trembled. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m—”
“You’re not sorry enough,” she said, and her teeth closed on his throat.
Not hard. Just enough to draw the bead of blood that ran down into his collarbone.
She’s right. She’s right and you know it. Every time you breathe down here you steal another breath from someone who doesn’t get to breathe anymore. Every time you let Charles touch you, you sign your name to their graves. You’re not the victim. You’re the witness who did nothing. You’re the accomplice who keeps breathing. You’re the one who still hopes. And hope is the worst thing you’ve done to them.
He woke choking.
Charles slept beside him, peaceful, arm heavy across Andrew’s ribs like a claim.
Furnace door shut.
No blood on his throat.
No teeth marks.
Just the chain. Just the dark.
Just the signal—still there, somewhere above him, a thin green pulse in the black.
And the guilt.
It no longer whispered.
It roared.
You will break. You will say yes. Or you will die down here with their names carved into every breath you take. Either way, you lose. Either way, they win. Either way, you were never innocent. Not even for a second.
Andrew stared at the ceiling cracks.
They looked like claws now.
Reaching down.
Patient.
Hungry.
Waiting for him to stop fighting.