r/shortscarystories
First Love [Valentine's Day 2019] by reddit user aspiringcadaver
She used to work at the liquor store where I bought my whiskey and lottery tickets. She was young, like I was, then. Short and pale with mousy brown hair. She was no extraordinary beauty, but she smiled at me. She was perhaps the only one who smiled at me in those lonely months.
That was something.
“Aren’t you a millionaire yet?” she asked me, once, as I made my purchases. I thought she was making fun of me, but she smiled.
“’Fraid not,” I said.
“What would you do with all that money? If you won, I mean.”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “What about you?”
“I’d buy an island,” she said, staring off into the distance. “Far away from here.”
That was something else.
That was what got me thinking about her late at night as I sat in my armchair, drinking and trying to forget. I liked to think about things far removed from reality, then.
After a while, she called me by name. She laughed at all my jokes about her island.
That December, I bought her a Christmas present. I had nobody else to buy for, after all. It was a book. Lord of the Flies.
“It was the only one I could think of that’s about an island,” I told her. “Only good one, anyways.”
She laughed. “You’re… something else,” she said.
Her laughter was musical. It stuck in my brain like a bad song; transformed my armchair fantasies into a sick, dull ache in my chest: a trembling thing, desperate to be relieved.
Recently, I learned that there are tiny, uninhabited islands a few miles off the coast of a neighboring state. They are nameless and little-known. You can take a boat there, if you’ve got one. I do.
I made a trial run last weekend. Little black crabs skitter along the mangroves and gulls fly overhead. The waves lap against the golden, rock-littered sand, uninterrupted by human conversation. After all, it was cold that February.
I told her all about it.
“Uninhabited,” she said. “That’s my kind of island.”
I imagined her eyes reflecting the sea. Her teeth flashing in the sun as she laughed. It was intoxicating.
The reality was sobering.
The tears in her eyes reflected the sea. Her teeth flashed in the sun as she cried out for release.
I ask her why she smiled at me the way she did, why she stoked those glowing embers.
“I was just… being friendly!” she choked, her voice dying behind the crashing waves. Her hysteria buried in the silent power afforded by my vessel.
So, I left her there, hobbled by injuries from fleeing barefoot over the mangrove roots and rocks. Figured she might feel differently about my company in a couple of days.
After all, it was cold that February.
But a few cold, hungry nights on the lonely shore didn’t warm her heart toward me.
Then, I discovered the caves. That changed everything.
She was only the first.
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/shortscarystories/comments/api9gx/first_love_valentines_day_2019/
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- I got permission to post stories from this author through sir Adam Davies
