**CREEPY PASTA Best Tales**

My Medusa

There are few times in life when a man can admit that he’s afraid of a beautiful woman. Sure, the shyness of lust and romance may be one excuse, but the legitimate fear of her power, as small or infinite as it may be, is something very hard to come by. This is the reason I am afraid of Laura. The role of a man is to protect his woman, never the other way around. I love her, but I am scared to death of her.

We met in junior high school. I wasn’t much to look at back then; I was a scrawny nerd obsessed with Pokemon and anime, often daydreaming day and night, never really doing much in favor of my social status. I would drift in and out of classes, letting apathy get the better of me. It was a lunch period that I first met Laura.

I sat by myself often, enjoying the time to think and reflect on my imagination, when Laura came to sit across from me. I looked at her but couldn’t help but notice her low-cut shirt. She had the body of a model at 15. I was instantly turned on, to say the least. Awkwardly, I’d said hello to her. She told me she was waiting for ‘a friend,’ but never mentioned who. We spoke a bit, generally about television shows, I mentioned Pokemon. I started to feel as if I’d instantly lost her interest. That’s when she started talking about books.

I’d never really read anything before that point, often caring nothing about that part of life, as no moving images meant no entertainment. The thing is though; your mind is a powerful thing. You can envision anything you want to, and that’s exactly what she taught me that day. “Let’s say you look at a book. On every page, you have adjectives, nouns, verbs, all of them describing things. Don’t think of the words themselves, but what they’re talking about. You can imagine the details in your head, like a movie.” From that point on, I started looking at reading differently, and slowly but surely, I adapted to this new form of nerdy obsession… Reading.

I didn’t see her again that year. As a matter of fact, I sort of forgot about her apart from the lesson and her beauty. It wasn’t until I was a 16 year old kid in high school that we met again. Laura was into gymnastics by then, and had just gotten through a relationship with one of the seniors on our school’s football team. I, sadly, had become picked on by a lot of kids, many like him. I never could stand up for myself, and I was used to getting pushed and hit like I was nothing more than a toy. I’ll admit, I had my habits that encouraged such behavior, but people always took it too far.

Laura and I met again as I was being shoved into my locker. A brute by the name of Carson was trying to pester me into making an ass out of myself in front of the crowd, telling me that if I didn’t take my shirt off and start squealing like a pig, I’d get a knuckle sandwich (well, it was worse than that). Laura came out of the blue and shoved him away. “Leave him alone,” she had said, “what are you, a kid?”

Carson just looked at her like she was nuts. “Dweeb boy’s your boyfriend?”

She didn’t respond. She just glared at him, and offered me her hand. I took it, and she hoisted me up from the bed of papers in the tiny metal jail. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to him. What’d he do to you?”

Carson just shrugged, and walked away. Laura and I ate lunch that day, and discussed how things had been through time. She remembered me very well, and asked about my reading. I told her I was starting to become more of a writer. She appreciated that change, and said I might be able to make a living off of it, if I got good enough.

For the first time, our eyes met in an intimate fashion, we just stared at one another, smiling. I knew she was beautiful, far too much so for me, but I was attracted to her. I was falling in love, I felt. We hung out frequently, and my daydreams quickly became filled with her. She added me on Facebook, expanding my friends list to 32. I became a bit of a stalker… I would look at her photographs, pleasure myself, and feel like a sickening dog afterward.