"Pretty girls like you get lost in these woods all the time, Alexa."
On the night of Sebastián's annual Beginning of Summer Bash, amiable and adventurous Melody Tryniski went missing. What might have appeared as a juvenile escapade - a casual incide...
Christopher Shaw's house September 24, 2018 6:01 p.m.
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DEAR YOU,
I FALL in love too fast. I know, hard to believe, but I do. It's simply different from your experience with love, that's all. You probably search for Prince Charming and expect your relationship to be perfect, whereas I look for imperfection and darkness. If you're a guy, you search for something that's not complicated. Either way, your definition of love is different from mine.
The guys I end up loving are always so nice at the beginning. I don't like them dark from the get-go, I find pleasure in playing pretend for a little while. That's what you do when you start seeing someone: you pretend you're something that you're not. And it's fun, waiting for one of us to crack. Of course, once we get comfortable with each other, parts of our true selves slip away, finding a release on the cracks that begin to form.
The guys I end up loving are always so rotten inside. There's a monster underneath their physical perfection, a nasty little thing that comes out to play when they notice that I'm just like them.
Maybe I'm the one who corrupts them with my own darkness or dark beings know how to find each other, smell each other, fear each other. I know how to pick them.
I guess that's why I fell in love with him. He's the symbol of comfort and protection, passion and lust, evil and darkness, all at once. He is complexity in human form, twisted and raw if you delve deep enough into his true nature; the natural instinct of being a killer.
We used to go to this little motel, just outside of Levittown, a half hour's drive from it. It was mostly during the night and I remember its sign blinking down on me, red on my skin. He always chose room number eight, so much that the motel's clerk knew what key to give him every time we came by... which was a lot. It became our golden eight, a place where we could be ourselves and reflect those dark selves with sex. My skin was always left marked.
I was his little secret. God, you don't know how much I loved and hated that.
There was this hideous painting inside room number eight, an acrylic disaster of our town staring back at me every time he banged me. It made me uncomfortable, but I learned how to handle it. One thing I love and miss about those times is cuddling with him after one of his violent fits, passing my finger on the tattoo that's above his right hipbone. It's a U with a Christian cross inside of it. I didn't understand it then, but it frightens me now.
In my soon-to-be short life, I've had two great loves. One who I loved (and still do) while I was intoxicated with him. This one is pure, the other is... he was the good kind of bad at the beginning.
