But Too Well

LXVIII : Repair

A/N: I had a lot of fun writing this one. Something to take the edge off. Enjoy.

***

SO, SINCE I promised to be honest, here's the truth: I've been thinking about sex. A lot.

But not in a clenching-my-knees-together kind of way. It's not that exciting. It's a lot more pathetic. I find myself wondering, and hoping, and worrying.

I miss sex. I want to want it. I wish I could fantasize, that I could feel my heart race and my breaths grow shallow and my skin tingle.

I used to begrudge it. I remember cursing myself, chastising myself, all those months, for wanting Nero when I had Caleb, for the undeniable, electric, visceral attraction that I knew wouldn't do me any good. I used to want him so bad that I could have crawled out of my skin.

It's so fucking ironic. You can laugh, I wouldn't hold it against you.

Life is cruel that way.

Because I crave intimacy, I miss having someone hold me, I miss feeling like I belong to someone in the wholest way possible.

I'm 26. I'm not supposed to be broken like this.

Marco is dead but he still lives in a small, scarred corner of my brain. I want to yank him out and light him on fire, let him crumble to ashes and bury him a million feet beneath the ground.

I want to feel flames, to feel my flesh burn and my heart burst and my muscles turn limp, melting from the pleasure of it.

And shit, I try to remember it. I try, I try, I try, to picture me and Nero but the memory of that fucking bastard who ruined me is always in the way, leering at me. It's not fair. It's so damn unfair.

It's overwhelming enough, this helplessness, to bring me to tears.

•§•

UNDER THE COOL, soft sheets of my bed, I try to conjure up the feeling of it.

Still being honest: I rarely used to touch myself.

Because for a long time I had Caleb, and then I was too hurt to even think of sex, and then I had Nero.

I can't even remember the last time I gave myself an orgasm.

But I want to feel something, besides numbness or pain.

I lit a candle, the warm glow casting shadows across the walls. I slipped under the covers, letting the material slide provocatively across my bareness.

I want this to work.

I close my eyes, run a had experimentally from my knee, slowly up the inside of my thigh. A slight tickle.

I let the sheets gather around my stomach so the air of the room brushes lightly against my breasts. I trail a finger up, over my navel, higher, circling tentatively around a flattened nipple.

I focus on the way it feels, force myself to be here, to think only about the sensations and not about any of the complicated, messy, hurtful memories that usually fill most of my waking moments.

I run the pad of my thumb lightly over the tip of one of my breasts. My nipple pebbles, just a little.

I listen to my own breathing, the sound of each exhale escaping into the silence around me.